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As I noted a few weeks back, Tokyopop, the company that came in changed comics and then crashed and burned, suspending publication for the most part back in 2011, is coming back as announced on a panel at Anime Expo with plans to begin publishing again in 2016″ announced by founder Stu Levy.

The company is seeking to license “hidden gems that are not yet noticed” from small or independent publishers.

In addition, Tokyopop plans to publish art books and collectors editions, and will consider light novels.

The company’s once-ambitious media plans continue with 20 properties—including Knockouts and Riding Shotgun— in development and a series of vidoes on the Tokyopop YouTube channel. Other plans include an anime review series on YouTube, “Pop Comics” a sharing app for iOS and Android for community sharing of comics.

This move was met with a mix of curiosity and hostility online which you can see developing in this ANN comment thread. While some former fans hoped for Tokyopop to finish series that were left hanging in 2011, others recalled the past sins of the company and vowed never to give Levy another penny.

If you’re wondering about the sins—which I covered in detail over the years—a tweet from Darryl Ayo sums it up:

TokyoPop can do comics three favors: 1) GIVE back the IP to the creators. 2) pay those creators backwages. 3) Fade Away And Never Come Back.

One of the more interesting things about Tokyopop’s new plans is that when users upload their own comics to the “Pop Comics” app “Users keep the copyright and 100% creative control of their uploaded works.” according to ANN. This was not always the case with Tokyopop, and much of the animus towards the company stems from their publishing history of signing up a lot of original creations by very young creators and refusing to give them the rights back, despite being long OOP (although the rights CAN be purchased back.) Among those creators: Brandon Graham, Becky Cloonan, Felipe Smith, Amy Reeder, Svetlana Chmakova, Rivkah la Fille….yeah kinda a pretty good lineup of people. Most of them don’t even like talking about their Tokyopop experiences any more but a few do:

Interesting to see both Tokyopop & Image trending.The company I had the most hassle with & the company who I've had the best experience with

There’s lot more if you Google around (god people were so loose lipped back in the day! In this day of FB and Twitter no one says anything!). This is not to say that Tokyopop might not come back with a new resolve and a business plan that’s 2015-ready. But at the very least some acknowledgement of past mistakes and a pledge to do things differently would be a great way to get a fresh start.

2 Comments on TOLJA! Tokyopop is back with publishing plans, last added: 7/3/2015

Im curious as to the face expressions of the panelist and the audience at this announcement.

Brandon Montclare said, on 7/3/2015 3:33:00 PM

Just some quick back-of-the-envelope math: TP paid out more than $2 million in page rates over a very short period of time to creators who were never previously published. Most very young. Much more than half female. I’ll guess that for 80% of them, they haven’t made as much money-per-page since. That was a pretty unique commitment that I don’t see ever happening again.

Moreover, there are a few known publishers who currently pay the same rate (about $100) and take the same rights (50% of at least publishing, sometimes also all media). That’s a terrible deal, but it is not unique to TP. TP’s OEL initiative was a complete failure. Every title lost money (they liked to pretend Dramacon was the one comic that saw a profit). It could have at least been remembered as interesting and ambitious, but the company always stuck to their bad practices–and they have always been blind when it comes to PR.

Founded in 1997, TokyoPop was one of the most influential publishers of the Aughts, driving the manga boom in the US as the first publisher to print manga in its original right-to-left format, a move that helped cement its authenticity among young readers. Later on their “original English language manga” line developed an entire generation of young creators working in a manga style, including Becky Cloonan and Amy Reeder Hadley. But it all came to an end in 2011 when the company shut down except for the German office. Owner and founder Stuart Levy went on to make a documentary about the Tohoku earthquake, even amidst continuing controversy about the reversion of rights to creators However there have been flickers of life since then, with some new digital publishing, licensing OEL books like King City to Image, and a TokyoPop-branded newsletter that was part of Nerdist’s adventures in that area.

Although the road has been rocky for TOKYOPOP of late, you can’t keep a good Robofish down. The company is in the process of reincarnation, with a focus on digital media and Asian pop culture. Stay tuned – the future awaits!

Going to AX or SDCC? Come check out our panels for cool announcements and giveaways!

Anime Expo:
Thursday, 7/2/15, 12:45PM
LACC Room 409AB

SDCC:
Saturday, 7/11/15, 6:00PM
Room 28DE

All attendees will receive a FREE ‘Knockouts’ comic!

Knockouts, above, is a comic based on a film of the same name, to be directed by Leo Kei Angelos, and from what we can glean produced by TokyoPop. The film is still in the concept stages, so obviously this is all part of getting some capital back drop by drop.

However, I’ve been thinking a lot about TOKYOPOP lately so I might as well let you into my mind (a scary place to be!). In a nutshell, I’m really excited about rebuilding TOKYOPOP.

But “rebuilding” isn’t the right word. It’s a convenient word to describe the process we’re going through now, but it’s not entirely accurate. My goal is not to return to the
TOKYOPOP of previous times; after all, what would be the point? The world has moved on, and our contributions at that time were for that world.

No, if TOKYOPOP is to mean anything in today’s world, we have to contribute something relevant now. And I truly believe we can.

Sure, the odds are typically against comebacks. Bands that have passed their peaks; athletes who can’t play like they could when they were younger; actors who can’t open films anymore; brands and businesses that are no longer relevant — all of these patterns are commonplace. But every now and then a true comeback occurs, whether it be John Travolta in Pulp Fiction; Tina Turner in the early 80’s; Apple from almost bankruptcy to mega-brand; or even Marvel from actual bankruptcy to world domination.

I think we can do it.
￼
Hey, even manga evolves, right?

And the key aspect of our strategy is to EVOLVE.

Stirring of life from a warehouse…or a true evolution? Time will tellm but even if there’s no money in comics, it’s hard to leave it all behind.

Their German office is quite productive.
I’ve no idea about how they treat their creators (one of their big problems here in the States).
One advantage they have is that they can publish German editions of English titles published by other companies in the U.S. (Like Seven Days.)
But they still have the same weakness their American office had… The original rights holder might decide to enter the market directly once it becomes stable. (Currently, Tokyopop, Carlsen, and Ehapa are the main publishers of manga.)
Tokyopop would be wise to follow Egmont’s example: set up offices in each country, nail down the rights for all of Europe, and publish the same catalog of titles in a variety of languages. This reduces marketing costs when you can fly in talent for a concentrated schedule of events.

[When visiting the German-language sites below, I suggest using Google Chrome, or another web browser which allows for easy translation of German. And if you read only one thing from this post, it should be this.]

Guten Tag!

Germany… it’s a bit of a conundrum in Continental comics.

Smack dab in the middle of Europe, it gets a lot of comics imported from other countries, mostly from neighboring Belgium and France. It has a bit of a comics tradition, especially with “Sarkasmus”. Satirical and social commentary, usually featuring tricksters, has been a literary tradition of Germany since at least Til Eulenspiegel, and even the official comics museum in Hannover, Deutsches Museum für Karikatur und Zeichenkunst Wilhelm Busch, features as much emphasis on caricature and editorial cartoons as it does on comics.

Yet, with numerous outlets for comics for both children and adults (Micky Maus Magazin sold over a million copies weekly at its peak, and there are numerous comics aimed at adults), there haven’t been many notable comics produced until recently. However, with the rise of the Internet and the worldwide popularity of manga, coupled with American publishers acquiring titles which are then licensed worldwide, there is a vibrant comics scene in Germany, and many titles worthy of export.An interesting ripple… A lot of Germans speak and read English, as the two languages are closely related linguistically, and many students learn it early in school. It is not uncommon to walk into a German comics shop and see a wall full of the latest Wednesday comics imported from the U.S. (actually Diamond UK). Fans, regardless of nationality, hate to wait for the translation, and will read the comics in the original American. Does this impact the circulation of the licensed translations? Probably not… as with America, there seems to be two markets: comics shops aimed at collectors, newsstands aimed at the general reader. Generally, with the superhero soap opera comics, the German publisher will collect multiple issues into an omnibus-style magazine, either as a thick digest, or a slimmer square-bound magazine. (Click the Panini link below for examples.)

So, here’s a brief introduction, with a few suggestions for further exploration if you’re curious.

Wer ist wem? (Who’s who)

Rupolphe Töpffer, from Geneva, Switzerland, is one of the forefathers of comics, creative during the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Writing originally in French, his influence spread to Germany and the United States. (The University Press of Mississippi has published two massive volumes on his work.)

Wilhelm Busch is the godfather of German comics. An illustrator and writer, he is best known for “Max und Moritz”, a cautionary tale of two scamps. (You can read an old English translation here.) His satirical poetry caused many an uproar, and he was censored for satirizing the hypocrisy of the Catholic church.

Dr. Erika Fuchs is the second-most influential person in German comics. From 1951 until retiring in 1988, she was the chief editor and translator of Disney comics in Germany. Her high standards and references to classical German texts gained her renown among Disney fans. Her use of verbs as onomatopoeia and soundless events (such as “shiver” or “gulp”) has influenced Internet chat dialogue in Germany, where the use of such terms (such as *runs away*) is known as Erikativ. (A detailed explanation for grammaticists, linguists, and Donaldists can be found here, with animated comparisons between the original English comics and German translations. Please note that Disney comics no longer use machine lettering.)

Where should you go?

The biggest comics show in Germany is held in northern Bavaria: the International Comics Salon Erlangen. A biennial comics art festival, it is the German equivalent of Angoulême, although not yet as crowded. (2014 attendance: 25,000) They award the Max und Moritz Preis via a jury, with one audience-voted prize. The titles are international in scope, honoring both local cartoonists as well as translated works. (Read my recap of the 2012 show.)

Those are BUILDINGS. There are 11 total. And, no, it’s not the biggest in Germany.

The other big show? The Frankurt Book Fair. A massive publishing trade show, they allow the public in on the weekend. Since comics have always been popular, publishers and organizers know to schedule events to entice fans. They even host the German Cosplay championship! Of course, there’s also an award: the annual Deutsche Cartoonpreis.

Since 2006, the Frankfurt Book Fair and Carlsen Verlag have awarded the “German Cartoon Prize for new talent”. Since 2012 the “German Cartoon Prize” in categories A and B have been awarded.
“A” stands for cartoonists who have not yet published a book. “B” is for cartoonists who have already published at least one book.

A museum:

In addition to the greater part of Wilhelm Busch’s complete artistic oeuvre, the German Museum for Caricature and Graphic Art in the George Garden in Hannover is home to a collection of more than 35.000 works by internationally celebrated representatives of the art of pictorial satire.

Among those represented are such great names from the past as Hogarth, Daumier, Grandville and Goya, as well as popular “modern classics” of the world of humour such as Ungerer, Sempé and Loriot. And of course, Wilhelm Busch simply can’t be left out.

A brief listing of German publishers:

Carlsen Verlag, strong in German manga, but also strong in licensed and original work

Ehapa, owned by powerhouse Egmont. As with other Egmont houses throughout Europe, they publish, almost exclusively, licensed titles aimed at kids. That means Disney, Asterix, Lucky Luke, as well as other imports. (Jaw dropping fact: Micky Maus Magazin has a weekly circulation of 125,000, and a weekly readership of 623,000! 10.7% of kids ages 6-13! Of course, adults read it too! To put that into perspective… there are some 54 million kids age 5-17 in the U.S.! Imagine five million kids reading a comic book each week….)

Panini Comics Deutschland Once owned by Marvel in the 1990s, Panini is best known in the U.S. for their sticker albums. In Germany, they license just about every American comics title available.

Reprodukt is a publisher of literary graphic novels. If you flip through their catalogs, you’ll see the usual suspects. A very good list!

Avant Verlag is a general publisher, but has a very strong catalog of original German graphic novels, as well as imports.

Tokyopop [No! Really!] Apparently, Kodansha and Viz haven’t figured out the German market yet, so Tokyopop has the German licenses for Deathnote, Bleach, Hetalia… as well as publishing local talent.

And some recommendations:

“Fritz Haarmann, one of the most brutal serial killer in Europe, worked as an informant for the Hanover police. Night after night he roamed the waiting rooms of the station looking for young, unaccompanied men. With the help of his police identification card he could gain the trust of his victims. He led them to his apartment, raped them and with a sexual frenzy, bit them in the throat.” (One of the inspiration for “M”, and the subject of Fassbinder’s “The Tenderness of Wolves”.)

E. O. Plauen was a popular, and tragic, figure in German cartooning. A master of the silent cartoon, best known for Vater und Sohn, he was arrested by the Nazi regime in 1944 and committed suicide the day before his trial.

Comics in German have now made it into the mainstream of society. For this reason, more and more publishers are now showing an interest in the new forms of storytelling that are unique to this illustrated genre. Our selection demonstrates this with a wealth of new names, who represent a broad spectrum of both subject matter and graphical techniques. It was the term “graphic novel” that first broke the ice. Booksellers and readers alike expect that the comics listed under this heading will offer meaningful content as well as a wide diversity of styles. For instance, it is now just as common to see journalism in comic form as it is to find experimental design work in terms of page architecture or picture structure.
At the same time, an intriguing development can be seen with the rapid growth in the number of literary adaptations. This means comics are tapping into entirely new strata of readership.
They are now gaining some cachet among the sort of booklovers who would, until now, have been sceptical of the quality of their subject matter.
From fairy tales to novellas and novels, every literary genre now seems to provide a suitable challenge for the comics illustrator. Publishers such as Suhrkamp and Edition Büchergilde have even launched their own special comics series for adaptations of famous works.
German-language comics have therefore broken into a field that was hitherto covered only by foreign language publications. And new opportunities are emerging for illustrators, who for years have complained about the dearth of good stories. The enthusiastic reactions of readers and critics alike to the new works make it clear that the comic has now arrived in the German book market

Let’s just say the manga advice series I did has reaped some…benefits. And other stuff that I didn’t expect. Whatever the case, there was an answer in the manga adapter piece that naturally raised an eye:

…and specifically comics-related experience, is going to serve you well. And whatever the industry overall may say about scanlations (and believe me, I could totally rant about aggregator sites all day), that’s not a bad thing to have on your resume, as far as I’m concerned.

When that was said, I naturally was curious and asked if she was serious about being able to rant about aggregators and scanlations all day. Her response by email:

I would totally be up for a good rant!

So that’s how I have this conversation I did a few weeks ago with Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, the adapter of Loveless and adapter/editor of a few titles on Crunchyroll and former editor at TOKYOPOP, today for your reading or listening pleasure. Have fun!

Before we begin, let’s start in the past: How did you become interested in manga, and how you got into the manga industry?

The short version is I’ve been a comic book fan pretty much my entire life. I’ve read a lot of Asterix and Tintin when I was a kid. I went through a big Marvel Comics phase when I was in late elementary through middle school, and then I’ve also always been interested in Japanese culture for various reasons. When I was in high school that’s when Sailor Moon started airing on Cartoon Network, and suddenly these two interests came together for me, like Japan and then the animation/manga side of things, and I really got hooked.

Because Sailor Moon was my first anime and manga love, I knew about TOKYOPOP from really early in the process and kind of in the back of my head I was always like, “Yeah, wouldn’t it be fun to be a manga editor someday, that would be a cool job!” So I went off to college, double majored in English and Japanese because I liked languages, and the Japanese department was small, I really enjoyed it there. I kind of expected I graduate, go work somewhere for a couple of years, and maybe go to grad school.

By a stroke of fortune, TOKYOPOP happened to be looking for a junior editor, it was the first time they had a junior editor position, and they were specifically looking for someone young, who they could train in the ways of creating original manga specifically. This is 2004, almost exactly 10 years ago at this point. And I had the right skill set for that. I had the Japanese language, I had the English, I done an internship in publishing in New York over a summer, so spring break my senior year in college I flew out to Los Angeles to interview and a couple of weeks later they hired me and almost as soon as I graduated I moved all the way across the country to LA and started a new job.

I was at TOKYOPOP for almost seven years, little over six and a half years, basically until the company shut down so I got laid off in February 2011 and the whole company shutdown two months later. Which was a pretty long haul as far as TOKYOPOP is concerned. It’s a company that always had a high staff turnover rate for various reasons, but it also had a really great gift for attracting interesting and hard-working people, so almost all the people who I know at TOKYOPOP have gone on to do really cool and interesting things, a lot of us are still really good friends with each other, so even though it was, you know, it ended in me getting laid off, it was still a really great experience for me to have and I’m glad I moved to LA, I’m glad I had this opportunity, and I’m glad they gave me that opportunity. I mean, they didn’t know who the hell I was when they hired me as a 21 year old so…to pull myself all the way across the country…I hope they think that decision paid off for them.

So how was it like to work at TOKYOPOP, back when the manga industry was doing pretty well, and then conversely, when the economy started to decline?

You know it’s interesting, because for all the flack TOKYOPOP gets for a lot of things, they were really prescient about where the industry was going. Part of the reason why, and even in 2004 when everybody thought the manga industry was at its peak, and it was, there was a sense internally that things weren’t necessarily gonna last. There’s a variety of reasons why that was the case.

For one, Kodansha had been one of the licensors that TOKYOPOP worked with a lot, from Sailor Moon to Peach Girl to Parasyte, to a lot of CLAMP titles, and Kodansha was moving away from TOKYOPOP and started their relationship with Del Rey, which was a big licensor hit in terms of what titles we had access to, and the philosophy behind trying to do original content was in part because we wanted to have our own titles to replace the licensed stuff coming from Japan, to see if we could get kind of a homegrown manga industry going in the US that would give us access to stuff that people were excited about in the same way they were excited about Sailor Moon or Fruits Basket. It didn’t really work out the way we entirely expected it to, although I’m still really proud of the titles that we did, and, speaking of people who have really been watching the industry, a lot of the artists who worked for TOKYOPOP have also gone on to do really interesting things in their subsequent careers.

So yeah, I think there was a sense of flux right there, in terms of the direction that things were moving in, and this is something I’ll talk about later in this rant, but there’s a lot of great things about being able to work with licensed titles, but there’s a lot of restrictions that come with it as well, and when you are the co-creator or part owners of original content, that means you have a lot more flexibility with what you can do with those titles and that includes, among other things, releasing them digitally, which was something that the Japanese licensors had been really, really, really slow to come around to. I mean any company’s gonna have its ups and downs, particularly a creative company, and one involved in a volatile industry. You know, Stu Levy’s a really big personality, and he and I have always gotten along really well, and his decisions were a big part of why they wanted to hire someone like me, so I’m really grateful for that. But you know, every company has its ups and downs…but I got to work with so many terrific, motivated, smart, and committed people over my time there and I wouldn’t have given that away for the world!

Ok, it’s time. Now you get to rant. Feel free to start wherever you want!

I think the best way to approach this subject is to kind of talk about the history of anime and manga content on the web, and I can track it through some of my own personal experience with that side of things. Like I said earlier, I started as an anime and manga fan with Sailor Moon in 1998, so I was using like, AOL and dial up to get access, and this is back in the days when there were very few anime titles being released in the US and there’s basically no manga. Viz had been doing Ranma ½ and a couple of other things, but you know, TOKYOPOP was just starting to release their magazines and then probably when I was a senior in high school was when they started releasing the bind up versions of Sailor Moon.

Until then the only way you could get that content was through basically illegally trading tapes with other anime and manga fans online. I don’t even remember who I got this from, but there was someone who I found through a network of fans who, I think I paid them like 10 bucks or something, and they emailed me a videotape with 12 episodes of Sailor Moon Stars taped onto it. This was like crappy quality, it’s 12 episodes, I think I asked for the beginning and then the very end of the series, because at the time it was being released on Cartoon Network but they only done the first two seasons, like Sailor Moon S was just getting released as I was heading off to college.

So I knew that there were 5 seasons of content out there and there were a couple of sites where you can find out general episodes and summaries of what was happening, but the only way to actually see them was through these pirated means. It was slow and they were low quality, so anytime you had an opportunity to purchase legitimate content, even though it’s still a VHS tape, like I went out and brought the Sailor Moon S movie when it came out on VHS, and that was just so much better quality than these third or fourth generation fansubs that were going around. It just hasn’t been taped over a zillion times.

And I think part of that kind of barter process was instilled in it, the idea that, “This is not the best way to enjoy this material.” The best way to enjoy it is to purchase a legitimate copy. The fan community was very much driving the other fans and within itself to these legitimate sources when they became available. For whatever reason I don’t remember there being much scanlation going on at the time. I think the resources were still too limited for that to be the case, and then I kind of disappeared into college in the mountains, so I feel like I fell out of what was going on in bookstore culture and I went back in and suddenly there’s this enormous manga section, things have completely changed in that two or three year time. But at the same time I was ahead of my college’s anime society for a couple of years so I was in charge of purchasing, so as more things were starting to become available, and the industry was really starting to grow, we had access to more content that I was able to spend some of the school’s money to purchase that and again, find these legitimate sources to bring the stuff over for my friends and colleagues in college.

At first I really started paying attention to scanlations ironically when I was studying abroad in Japan and at that point I had two and a half years of Japanese language study under my belt so I could kind of read manga relatively competently and I was completely obsessed with Hikaru no Go. I had a boyfriend back in college who wasn’t a Japanese major but he’s the one who actually taught me how to play Go when we first started dating, and so I read this series about this kid who plays Go and I was like, “Oh my god, he would totally love this! But I’m reading it in Japanese, there’s no way for him to read it, I’d really like to share this with him but what can I do?” And a friend of mine told me about this website called Toriyama World, which was a scanlations community that was mostly doing Shonen Jump titles, they were doing Hikaru no Go, Bleach, Hunter x Hunter, andNaruto. So I sent my boyfriend these links and he got to read Hikaru no Go at the same time I was reading it. It was really exciting, and it made the long distance thing a lot nicer.

Simultaneously, Toriyama World started fansubbing the Naruto anime as it was coming out. And that was my first exposure to BitTorrent, and boy did that change everything. So instead of crappy third generation fansubs that are passed around on video tapes or like the year before one of my anime society friends found a cash of fansub stuff online and kind of dumped it onto the school network so I spent a couple of days of finals week downloading—

W-Weren’t you supposed to be studying or something? *laughs*

Oh I was totally studying, I was a Japanese major…I was a bad Japanese major, I bet my Sensei’s were all ashamed at me *laughs*. So this was accessing content in completely different ways. We’re talking DVD quality, coming out the same week as the episodes in Japan, with, depending on which group you were talking to, there were varying qualities of translation, but they were generally pretty good.

Skip to two years later, I get hired by TOKYOPOP, two of the founders of Toriyama World are my co-workers oddly enough – it took me a while to figure that out – so there was an obvious connection between scanlations and fansub industry and “legitimate” anime and manga industry. There’s a lot of translators, at least there were, I assume this is still the case that we’re coming out of, the fansub community, there’s a lot of editors who were coming out of the scanlation community.Both editing and translating are kind of apprenticeship positions where you can be a Japanese major and sort of learn the language but the way you get good at sort of the nuance of translating things that are colloquial which is by practice, there’s kind of a learning process. Textbook Japanese and what people use in real life VS Japanese that people use in anime and manga. And you kinda have to practice that and the scanlations and fansub community is one way to get that experience. And there’s definitely a recognition, or certainly a tacit recognition, in the industry, that these people who are really passionate about the media they’re working on, they really care about the quality, so they make good employees.

Fruits Basket had just been licensed, or just started getting released when I started at TOKYOPOP, I think we were on volume 5, and that series had been picked up by TOKYOPOP in part because of an online survey that they run, which asked what titles should we do, and everyone was like you should do Fruits Basket. People wouldn’t have known about Fruits Basket as even an option if it weren’t for things like scanlations and fansubs. It’s very clear that those built a level of awareness for some of these early properties in the marketplace at the time and they still do.

This is why it’s kind of exciting where we are now: Magi shows up on Crunchyroll and it’s a huge hit, people seem really excited about it, so when Viz picks up the manga rights to do a release of that there’s a group of people that are already super into that series and they’re planning to buy that book. It certainly happened with Attack on Titan last year.

So the feedback loop between sort of brand awareness and however you’re getting it, and people purchasing the stuff later, that’s really important and something the industry is very aware of. The problem that you run into – and the animation community has been able to solve this problem thanks to services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, Hulu and being able to get these series simulcasted in Japan – that hasn’t really happened quite as much in manga, and there’s a lot of reasons why that’s the case, but it’s incredibility frustrating why this is the case.

The best example I can think of is during my final few years at TOKYOPOP. I was working on a series called Gakuen Alice, which is a long running shoujo series, it ran in Hana to Yume, the same magazine as Fruits Basket. We started it as soon as Fruits Basket finished, and there was a sense in the company that we needed another big hit. Fruits Basket had been an enormous money maker for TOKYOPOP for years and there wasn’t anything that was such a big hit on the horizon for us, and for a lot of other companies as well. We were going to really try and make Gakuen Alice a hit.

And there was a lot of reasons why I didn’t think it wasn’t ever going to be that big a hit, or at least not in the same way: it was a different tone, it’s a different kind of age group, characters are much younger, and the story’s dark but in a different way. But it’s still a really good series, and it’s something that I really enjoyed working on and I’m very proud of, and it sold…not very well at all. Like it didn’t even sell like half of Fruits Basket numbers, it sold like less than a quarter of Fruits Basket numbers, which, whatever, media creations are a tough industry. You can think something can be a hit but it’s not, hits come out of nowhere, we would be completely surprised at what people were picking up on.

The frustrating thing about Gakuen Alice was that at the time – 2010, 2011 – it was the third or fourth most popular series on MangaFox. There were literally millions of people reading that series every month. And not even a fraction of them were actually buying the book. You hear a lot of criticism of “legitimate titles not being as good and the translations are awkward, fansubbers are more authentic, and etc, etc.” Yeah, maybe sometimes, but the scans for Gakuen Alice were terrible. Absoultely awful! Like they were scanning stuff from the Chinese editions and sort of backtracking it into English, everything was awkward, the quality of it was terrible from a visual perspective, and we were working our butts off to make this a really good looking book. So it was incredibly frustrating to see that there was all these people enjoying an inferior and mediocre product and we have something that we really want them to enjoy and get excited about, and they weren’t doing it.

But I don’t think this is really the fault of the fans, or at least not directly, and I don’t think it’s the fault of the companies. I think it’s kind of a larger issue where there’s a disconnect between enjoying content online and realizing where it comes from, and that there’s people who make their livings by creating it, and when you’re enjoying it for free, you’re sort of denying people the ability to make their livings. And obviously with the demise of TOKYOPOP for whatever reason, that denied me the ability to make my living for a while, and I started doing other things instead, and just doing manga as a sideline freelance business.

But for the creators back in Japan, for original creators here — so like I spend a lot of time on Tumblr, and I see this all the time, every single week: there’s some artist who are great fan artists, great original artists, and they post stuff on Tumblr, and then a day later they see their work going around with their name not attached to it anymore. And you’re like “We’ll ok that’s great, the people are still seeing your work and you’re still getting your art out there to the broader world and they’re enjoying it.” But these are people who do this for a living, whether it’s because they’re being paid to or they make money doing commissions, so when you take their name off it and sort of disconnect them from that process, the million people who saw that piece of art, maybe 1% of them would have liked to give that artist $10 for a commission or buy a poster for $20. And they don’t have the ability to do that anymore.

And they will have fights with the people who are taking their name off and it would turn into this weird artistic rights discussion of like, “Yeah you should just appreciate that people are enjoying your stuff.” But it’s like, “I need to buy groceries, you know, this is my job,” and whether people are like, “Oh, artists should just do what they love because they love it.” Well, yeah, hopefully everybody has a job that they enjoy to some extent. But, some of these people have gone to school for this in the same way people go to be a lawyer or a doctor, so you don’t expect a lawyer or a doctor to work for free, why would you expect an artist to work for free? “No, it’s because they’re passionate about their craft!” Well yeah that’s true, but again, somebody’s gotta pay the bills.

So I think that kind of fan feedback that had existed when I was first getting into the fandom and then into the industry has been completely disconnected, both by internet culture in general and by the nature of the aggregator sites, which, they’re not even connected to specific scanlation groups, like the Gakuen Alice chapter – one chapter would be done by one group, one chapter would be done by the next group, there’s group credit there, you would go back to their website and would see that…it becomes this kind of meaningless product that you just blaze through at 100 miles an hour and read 100 chapters of manga over the course of an evening and it kind of goes in one ear and out the other. Manga is designed as a product to be read quickly and to be read in bulk like that. I can see, I’m 100%, as a manga fan, understand why that’s appealing, but the fact that very little of that traces back to an idea of “I love this creator, I love their work, I want to support them,” that’s what I found very frustrating.

And for some people, it’s not even on their radar in some ways. One of the artists that worked for TOKYOPOP, Queenie-Chan — she did a series for us called The Dreaming, and she’s done a lot of manga work in various contexts since then — has been doing a couple of articles recently on what it’s like to be a Western manga creator or non-Japanese creator and she worked in Australia. She talked about doing a presentation to middle school kids and showing them what kind of stuff do you read and what they were into and she mentioned that you could go buy it somewhere, and the kids were like, “You can buy manga?” Like they just had no idea that they could go to the bookstore and buy copies of the stuff that they love.

Yeah they were in the library, it’s like, “urgghh!” That’s so…urgghhh, I feel so bad for my friends who are working at Viz and Yen Press and stuff and like, “How do you overcome that? How do you kind of deal with that disconnect?”

…Yeah, that’s kind of the bulk of my rant. *laughs* I mean the secondary thing is, and this is another reason why I feel sorry for my friends who are still working on the company side even though I envy their steady paychecks, is the licensors, and the nature of digital publishing in the West. It’s been so difficult to get comics content to a place where you can buy it digitally. And I think that more and more people want to consume things on their computers and they want to read them on any sort of tablet device, but that’s a relatively new thing.

So when I was at TOKYOPOP, ComiXology as a company was just starting out and we were trying to work with that to put some more titles up there, and since then ComiXology’s become huge and recently TOKYOPOP’s managed to put our old original titles on ComiXology, and I know there’s a few other manga publishers who are doing some licensed stuff on there. The Japanese, kind of rightly or wrongly — it’s not really my place to make a judgment on this, and also I’ve been out of that part of the industry for about three years now, so I’m not as up on this as I used to be — they’re really nervous about digital stuff. They’re really nervous about putting content from different publishers in the same context together. That’s always been an issue, like, back in TOKYOPOP when we had an advertisement, “There’s a bunch of TOKYOPOP series, we want to put them on one page together!” But characters from one company, like characters from Hakusensha and here on the side characters from Kadokawa. Ok, fair enough. But that means when you’re coming up with a way, like what would the Crunchyroll of manga look like, and now there is a Crunchyroll of manga, and there hasn’t been until very recently. Like that was a really difficult thing for the Japanese to come and agree to. JManga tried to do it but they were working with what I would describe as second-tier licensors for the most part, and so the content that they had wasn’t necessarily what people were excited about — although I was excited to be working on Tactics for a while.

But yeah, they were really worried about sort of reverse importation, so like stuff coming out digitally in the US, then people reading it in Japan, and it was very strange at the time. So just trying to get digital rights out of them was like pulling teeth for so long. And that really felt like it held back the industry when it was clear that was the direction things were going in. I don’t really know what flipped the switch and what made that change all of a sudden. Maybe the success of Crunchyroll in general, maybe it’s clear that ComiXology and similar programs is a profit making opportunity and that is something that is working well and so many people want to engage in, but it was so incredibly frustrating as someone working at TOKYOPOP to see the writing on the wall and see that like, there’s so many people who want to consume this stuff online and we are unable to provide that for them.

I mentioned this in the manga adapter interview that a lot of the people in the US publishers know what the problem is, and then convincing the licensors that that’s a problem and that we need to find a solution to it, that’s a whole ‘nother story. So it feels like the people on the US side get the blame for these decisions like “why do you do it this way?” We would if we could! We would love to do that! Write a big email to so and so in Tokyo and tell them that’s the way you want to consume your media because we’ve been telling them that and it hasn’t been moving things forward.

Well ok, I guess a couple of things I can bring up…you made a great distinction about how times have changed, like back then you could put up an online survey and people would actually buy the product, but I think nowadays if you try and do survey, like I know there are people who would want to buy a series called Chihayafuru or another series, but then, there are people who then won’t buy it. Like, what’s going on here?

That’s the really frustrating thing about online polls. They get answered by the people who like answering online polls and they don’t necessarily predict consumer behavior. That’s been one of the frustrating things about the industry, and while I think this is true for about any sort of consumer industry, media in particular, there’s often been a disconnect between people who actively communicate with the company and the general buying public. So if you went by the taste of the manga blogosphere, you’d think we need to be publishing a lot more indie, josei, and seinen manga…and that stuff doesn’t sell.

I mean I love those genres, and I’m kind of indiscriminate in my reading taste, I’ll read almost anything, but yeah, we’ll see how this changes, I always have this kind of belief that the kids who are reading, who are 15 while I was 25, and were kind of getting into anime and manga at the same age that I was when I was getting into it, would kind of blow through shoujo and shounen stuff, and if they continue to be manga readers their taste would mature and they’d start to want stuff that’s a little more complicated, more sophisticated. That’s not to underrate the sophistication of shoujo and shounen, I think there’s some really amazing stuff that happens there, but there’s a difference, and we’re just starting to get to the point of the industry where now those kids are almost 25. They’re where I was when I was working at TOKYOPOP and my tastes started to change. So I’m curious to see how that affects things and if their tastes do start to align more with their age group in some ways.

That’s a difficult thing, you have to always take feedback, online polls, and what the reviewers say with a grain of salt. “Like that’s your opinion, you’re really smart and we respect your opinion, but I think the 10 other thousand people reading this title are reading it for very different reasons than you are. And they’re getting something very different out of it than you are.” And I think that’s okay. We think that’s a need that we need to serve. And just because you love this series doesn’t mean that more than 5 other people are going to love the series. And 5 people are not enough to make a book profitable.

This is the way the publishing industry works in general. What happened during the early days of the manga boom is that everything was a best-seller, everything was selling thousands and thousands of copies, and as we blew through the pre-existing titles that everybody knew and was excited about and started to get to things that were newer, more obscure, or didn’t have the name recognition like a CLAMP, things started to even out and so it resembled more what conventional publishing in the US looks like, where the Dan Brown’s and Stephen King’s, and Fifty Shades of Grey’s of the industry paid for everything else. There are very few things that are popular or super profitable. It’s the few bestsellers that support the rest of the industry. And that’s kind of the way I think things are now. That’s just the way it is. And if you have enough best sellers, and enough stuff that’s doing well, then you can afford to take on stuff that’s a little more different and unusual and a little more risky than to kind of feed that niche but you need to have that core of people buying Naruto & Bleach every month to be able to take that risk as a company.

It’s been interesting, now that I’ve been out of the industry and see it from the outside. to see what people are doing with stuff. Like Yen Press really likes to do these high-end cover editions for stuff, it’s a little more off the beaten path. So like A Bride’s Story, which is a gorgeous book, I don’t know what the sales numbers are for that, but they’ve done a fabulous job with it and it’s not something that I would expect to be a huge best seller, so I hope that they’re making tons and tons of money on it because it’s so great, but I think they’re counterbalancing that by making it a higher end product. It costs a little bit more, so maybe only half as many people would buy that as an average Yen Press title but they can balance out the profitability by making a higher end edition.

I think the companies here are getting creative with how they strategize and manage to kind of put out more unusual content without it making a huge dent in the profitability, but that’s always going to be a tough battle.

How do you think the scanlation system has changed from when you started in the industry to today? When we traded emails you talked about there was a difference from the old system compared to today, so could you elaborate on that?

I’ve never been directly involved in scanlations on the creation side so I may be speaking out of turn on this, but I feel like there’s, as an occasional consumer of scanlations, there’s certain groups that really pride themselves on quality and groups that pride themselves on speed, or function like that’s their goal, to get it out there as quickly as possible. And I think that’s really interesting. And again, the aggregate sites you get a mix of translation and production quality. You can really sort of see that in action, almost on a chapter by chapter basis like, “Oh this translation I understand what’s going on, it’s really clear, it’s catchy and punchy,” a chapter later you’re like, “Ughhh, this barely looks like English! Like did they just run this through Google translate? What the hell is this font that they’re using? Did they even bother retouching this stuff? *laughs* Even the scan quality’s really weird!”

And I feel like back in the day where there’s a higher bar of entry, where it was a little harder to put together a group of people and have access to these resources, it forced people, you know it was only people who were committed to this, and into it, who were going to bother with this stuff, because you have to obtain the volumes from Japan, you’d have to have a pretty good scanner, internet speeds were slower so it takes a longer time to upload images, and sharing back and forth between people is a lot more of a pain in the neck. I think that just slowing down the process a little bit, it would reinforce quality. At the same time…I hope this doesn’t come off as “Oh, everything is terrible now, the internet’s ruined everything—“

Uh-oh! *laughs*

*laughs* No, it has absolutely not! I think the modern age is amazing, the resources available and the fact that so many people all over the world can enjoy this stuff and can get involved in this I think is amazing. So I think that the resources that are available to people now are just—I couldn’t even imagine when I was a teenager. Like there’s just so off the radar of what’s possible. But I guess I want there to be a little more consideration of the process and for people to think a little more critically about what they’re doing, and that it’s not just “this content magically exists and we’re going to magically put it on this site so billions of people can enjoy it, possibly at the expense of the person working very hard to create it,” Because manga creators work hard, that is a thankless job. Unless you’re one of the big ones, you’re not gonna be making a living doing it. I feel that there’s some sort of anarchist corners of the internet that’s like “wrest creativity away from corporate productions,” and you know, ok, whatever, but your average manga creator, these people work themselves to the bone to make this stuff!

Yeah, like the people who work on weekly schedules, sure they got like eight assistants working for them but they’re doing 20-30 pages a week, that’s crazy!

In a certain way Bakuman showcased the type of work schedule a mangaka usually goes through.

Right, right. Yeah, say what you want to about corporations, and I’ll be the first to get in line and be like, there’s a lot of nasty things that can be said about some of the corporate domination of media, but at the end of the day the people who suffer when this material’s been pirated are the people who are creating it. And those are the last people who should be suffering. Because you know the great thing about manga is that it’s so creative and inventive and the best stuff out there is really amazing and those people should be profiting from their work.

So I think one of the things I mentioned in the manga adapter email was that I thought that the quality of translators in general was improved. I’d be curious to hear what other people in the industry think about that because I think to some extent it’s part of the generation of people who grew up on this stuff and are coming of age and now they’ve graduated college with their own degrees in Japanese or whatever, and their own ideas on how manga should be read and what’s the best way to do a translation, and I think that’s really cool and interesting. I’d be curious if other people, even anecdotally, share my feelings on that.

Adapters are still a really important part of the process and to some extent it’s because I believe in the process of specialization. I myself feel like I’m the jack of all trades but master of none, so I really respect people who commit themselves to getting really really really good at one part of their craft, whether it’s being an artist, writer, or being a manga adapter and being able to come up with — and I said in my answer that I have a hard time coming up with distinct character voices. I can recognize them when they’re there, but honestly creative writing’s not my specialty, so finding someone who really knows how to make one character’s speech style distinct in English as opposed versus other characters, I think that’s really a great skill.

But I feel like at the same time more and more translators that I work with kind of get that and they know what manga is supposed to look like, sound like and they just have a better instinct about that in some ways? It’s not universally true, like there’s definitely some scripts that I feel like I have to massage a lot more than others, but I don’t know I guess I find that heartening.

The other funny thing about scanlations/fansubs industry going legit is that you have a zillion people who are used to working for free and now there’s some freelance opportunities when you’re like now I can pay them something! You don’t end up getting paid very much, but I think for a lot of people it’s like, “I was doing it before, at least now I’m getting something so it’s gotta be good!” I think that’s really a bit of the problem. Because you compare what people are getting paid for digital content versus what they’re getting paid to work on stuff that’s going into print, and there’s a huge difference.

I mentioned this in the previous interview as well because a lot of this is because I had no idea what the profitably is like in the digital space, and I don’t know if anybody else does either, I’m sure the people inside the company has a better idea than I do, but I still think it’s a new enough part of the industry that I think it remains to be seen how much money you can invest in it and still be profitable. I’m hoping it’s all really successful, and that it continues to grow and thrive, and that everyone gets a pay raise at some point. I think everybody who I’ve worked with really loves what they’re doing and they’ve worked pretty hard and I’d like to see them get compensated for that a little bit better.

One last question: It feels like, for people trying to get into manga, they’re really unsure of what’s legal and what’s known, so I want to just ask you do you think manga publishers are doing enough to educate people on manga, what goes into making manga, etc? Like a couple of months ago the New York Times did an article where they were listing comic book apps and they listed a manga site app…but it wasn’t a legal one. So it makes you wonder: are manga publishers doing enough to say this is what’s legal, this is what manga is, stuff like that?

That’s a really good question, and I think it ties into something I said before where there is this cultural disconnect between content creation and legal vs illegal or intellectual property rights. In some ways I feel like it’s not just the manga publishers’ job to do that. Like maybe there are ways they could be addressing that a little bit better and be more proactive about that but at the same time I feel like saying that kind of throws anime and manga fans under the bus and it’s definitely not just them. Like anybody who pirates a TV show or downloads a book rather than paying for it and downloads a PDF somewhere, like I think there’s a whole cultural conversation that needs to happen about IP and how the work gets handled. And this is what we’re seeing and that’s kind of a side result of it that happens to be particularly obvious in this particular industry for certain reasons.

I think this is where I’m going to be really off the mark because this was stuff that was going on three years ago and I have no idea how it’s developed internally since then. There was for a time, sort of an attempt, among the US Manga publishers to join up and shut down sites like OneManga and MangaFox that kind of got thwarted for various reasons, partly because we were a US company and some of these hosting sites were hosted in places where the US doesn’t have any sovereignty. If your servers are in Russia, or Sweden, if you’re PirateBay or whatever they were based, there’s only so much you can do under US law to be able to deal with that. And even if you do, it’s super expensive, so if you’re running a business that’s on a tighter profit margin, is it worth spending a million dollars in legal fees to try and prevent that? Maybe? Maybe not? I think that’s a really hard calculus to make. And again, I have no idea where that ended up panning out internally, this is what I recall from three years ago.

That’s another thing, marketing to people in this day and age is really tricky, particularly kind of the younger audiences, kids who are on their cell phones, on the internet all the time, kind of talking to them in more conventional marketing ways, whether it’s like the ads in the back of the books or stuff at conventions, I think it’s really difficult to have that conversation to get people to pay attention to it. So it might be nice if people did more but I’m not sure what that would consist of, other than a larger cultural conversation. Who knows, maybe it’s already being addressed just by the companies trying to provide alternatives in better ways so if people want to read manga digitally now we’re starting to have a lot more viable ways of doing that. I was thinking about this the other day, would it make sense for Viz to advertise on MangaFox?…Maybe?

*laughs*

Like…kind of? Like how much are the Japanese licensors are going to totally flip out if that happens? The idea that Viz is giving money to the people who are stealing from them, allowing this method of stealing from them. Obviously not necessarily Viz, MangaFox only posts things that are not available, etc, but yeah the Japanese licensors are going to be pissed about that. I remember that that was a debate internally at TOKYOPOP at one point, it was like, “Do we try and squash these companies or do we try and advertise on them?” *laughs* Like it’s a weird calculus to have to be making.

And I would say for all the things that are super frustrating about aggregator sites, there is still the awareness factor. There are still ways of providing kind of a preview taste of content and getting people excited about it. Game of Thronesis one of the most pirated shows on TV right now but it’s still a huge hit as far as HBO is concerned. Is the piracy preventing it from being a huge hit or is it helping it because more people are being exposed to it and maybe they’ll later buy the DVDs or merchandise? That’s really one of the more bizarre things about the media landscape right now: does that really help or hurt? I think it hurts more than it helps, but there are cases where you’re really not sure about it. So…I don’t know. I’m glad that’s not my decision!

But I do hope we have that cultural conversation sooner rather than later because that reflects so much of a landscape right now, but yeah I’m not sure that’s Viz’s responsibility to lead the way on that necessarily. Or people are just like, “Oh it’s Viz, they got like tons and tons and billions of dollars because they got Naruto, so we don’t really need to bother giving them our money, they’re already rolling in it.” Yeah, but they’re a publishing company. Publishing companies are never really rolling in it. I think that’s what people need to understand. It’s not like Hollywood where Disney has a gazillion different profit centers and they’re really raking in the cash. Publishing is always a really hit or miss game.

Lillian, thanks for taking the time to do your “Rant”. *laughs*

Thanks for giving me the opportunity!

5 Comments on Former TOKYOPOP Editor’s “Rant” On Scanlations and Aggregators, last added: 5/19/2014

Geez louise, what a read. I remember there was an article saying that piracy boosts sales of certain products. I know the music/movie industries are furious about it, but it seems more like a marketing problem as Lillian suggested. Instead of thinking about marketing, they decide to go after all piracy, which won’t end well…

I thought about how to best solve the cultural disconnect, but it seems like we may have to wait a long time for it to happen and it’s difficult if people who know how to solve it can’t relay those words properly to those who don’t care/understand. I still remember this quote from an article in Japan Times about Japan cooperation for anime cons.

“I personally think that (overseas) anime cons will get 10 times bigger than they are now, while the market in Japan has maxed out and can only shrink. It’s up to us to tell Japanese companies that they really need to cooperate now. That’s our mission.”

Do we really have to wait for everything to hit completely rock bottom for the manga industry to make a move? I joked that I have a bit of cognitive dissonance with regards to the manga industry. Oh well, back to making Japanese people suffer by reading their funnies!

zetsubouzhainu said, on 5/19/2014 11:58:00 AM

Wonderful interview; there’s just so very much I can comment on positively in response. I will say, first and foremost, that I really appreciate your candidness, Lillian; usually, when we hear from industry reps, it’s always that scanlation is entirely negative and has no positive elements to it, and fans are entitled and stuck-up, which, quite frankly, is against my personal experience as someone who grew up on pirated anime and manga and owes a lot of my current collection to scanlation. The fact that you admitted straight up that fan translations influenced you positively before added a lot of credence to the assertion that the scanlation environment *now* has become less helpful and more unhealthy. That’s also how I’ve felt– it may have been a decent force when the industry was building and booming, but now with aggregators and the shift in culture, it definitely seem like fansubs and scanlations are more harmful than helpful.

Since there’s simply way too much I can comment on, I will say this– in response to your anecdotal observation that translations seem to be getting better (essentially) because more fan translators are going pro, I’ve also noticed this. If you replace “better translations” with “translations fans prefer,” certainly that’s true. I notice more anime and manga with liner notes, Japanese puns kept in-tact, SFX, honorifics, and everything else I’ve been used to as a scanlation/fansub consumer. A lot of Yen Press’s books feel like (good) scanlations, and I love it. Although it seems more prevalent in some of the publishers with less history like Yen Press or Kodansha, I even see liners in Funimation subs nowadays. I think it makes perfect sense; if scanlation fans complain that the official translations don’t have these elements, then they no longer have a reason to complain– they’re all right there!

As an aside. I’d love to see more transparency with former fansubbers and scanlators explaining why they’ve decided to go pro, as I think that’d make a great case for purchasing legal content, but I can certainly understand why people would avoid that.

Justin said, on 5/19/2014 2:51:00 PM

Yeah it IS a long read haha. Sorry but not sorry I guess

Well, from what I think is clear, and your quote from the Japan Times kind of confirms it, Japan is really holding everyone back, and that’s a major problem. Sure, we can do some stuff now, but how much stuff can publishers not do? What’s hiding behind those negotiations? Overall, I think most of us know the JP publishers were a problem, but…they may be even more than we could have even imagined.

Wait a moment, didn’t it hit rock bottom back when the economy went down? Was kind of sure, and especially with Titan’s success, that it’s at least going up now. Don’t think it can hit rock bottom anymore.

Justin said, on 5/19/2014 2:56:00 PM

Thanks! I’m glad you read (or listened, or both lol) to it!

“As an aside. I’d love to see more transparency with former fansubbers and scanlators explaining why they’ve decided to go pro”

Sure, I can work on that. When, you know, I find time, I defeat laziness, and find people who were scanlators and ask why’d they go pro.

…Is it now awful that I’m associating this with sports? Like scanlation/fansubbing’s the minor leagues then you go pro and go and play in the majors…Ok, I’ll stop now.

wanderindreamr said, on 5/19/2014 5:31:00 PM

The Gauken Alice bit actually reminded me of something, I remember TP was really pushing the title when it was about to come out and they even had this huge contest, 30 questions on 30 days and if you answered all of them right you got entered to win a prize but each question was only up for a day. I remember having to scramble for a few (it was over the holidays so I was at a cousin’s house) and don’t think I even got them all but I got one of the grand prizes anyway (a few pencil boards, the book with a huge crease in it, a t-shirt and one or two smaller things I’ve forgotten). And I remember telling my mom after the very first question went life “but if I hadn’t even been reading this online I wouldn’t be able to answer it, this isn’t for getting people into the series!” and even at 15/16 that felt pretty weird and I guess I finally got my answer to that!

With Toykopop hovering somewhere between somethingness and nothingness, one thing is certain: owner Stu Levy will never give the creators back their books as long as he might be able to leverage them in Hollywood. Fair enough; he paid the money and the creators signed those bad contracts.

In case you came in late, back in the day Toykopop signed up dozens of young (and a few not so young) creators to produce brand new original manga-styled graphic novels. The contracts gave more than 50% of the rights to TokyoPop and although many books came out—and a few even did well—when the manga giant imploded, many series were left unfinished.

One of them was The Boys of Summer by Chuck Austen. In the course of researching the Tpop story, Brigid Alverson wrote to Austen and he responded with an essay of surpassing clarity:

Tokyopop was a stupid, poorly run company that took our brilliance, and sincerity and passion and crapped on it. But they also gave us something important, something useful.

They gave us an opportunity to get our work out there, to develop fans. To display our creativity and professionalism. How many people can say they’ve created 200 pages of graphic novel? Or 400? Or eight? Not many. You should be damn proud of what you achieved. Don’t let Tokyopop’s stupidity take that accomplishment away from you the way they took your creation.

Instead use it. Use what you did, what you achieved, and build something for yourself. You’re not just a one-trick pony. You’re an amazing, energetic, imaginative creator who can do something even better. So get over it. Stop complaining and wishing for miracles, and let go. Take the good you got from the experience with the unctuous Stu Levy and make something else, something better, something fan-frickin-tastic for which you retain all rights, rights that Tokyopop, Marvel, DC, and every other corporate sphincter in the world will wish they could take from you, editorially digest into a flavorless pablum for the masses, and poop out to their audience.

Now, Chuck Austen has been many thing in comics, from his early days drawing Miracleman (our own Padraig will certainly mention him anon) to drawing porno for Aircel to writing Superman to writing the Avengers to creating cartoons. At many points he’s been an object of derision from fans and the butt of jokes but…I think he might be having the last laugh:

I’m now a successful producer at Cartoon Network, and in my spare time I write a popular and solidly selling series of novels based on a TV series I created many years ago but never sold — all made possible because of positive response and respect for my comics and manga work. Fans from that world followed me to my novels, and those have earned me more money than I even made off of a television series I co-created and saw become a number one hit.

There is much more in the piece, but basically, Austen is explaining how to Have A Career, Not A Project. You keep on going and keep producing and finding opportunities and you don’t look back.

I know a few people in this business who are still mourning a book that got stolen from them in the ’70s. No lie. If you can only create one successful property in 40 years, maybe this wasn’t the job choice for you. Of course, as I always say, this does NOT EXCUSE PUBLISHERS WHO RIP OFF CREATORS. No way, no how. But still…I can only think of two cases where, as it happens, a team of creators had only one idea and that was it. One is Siegel and Shuster—they had their big, world changing idea and sold it for $130.

The other is Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. With all respect to their further output, they hit bingo the first time out when they created the Turtles in 1984 as a self-published comic. Luckily, they had a great agent, held on to everything and made several fortunes along the way. (And one of them lost several fortunes as well.)

The best advice is DON’T GET RIPPED OFF. But if you do…you must move on and create something else. And don’t make the same mistakes again. Chuck Austen didn’t. Learn from him.

I miss Austen’s comic writing and felt sick at the hate he received. His stories were always solid, with strong, multifaceted characters. He remained interesting by never holding back when it came to breaking with redundant conventions, showing “heroes” acting like real people, who more often than not, making the wrong life choices, arguing, questioning their roll in things, sleping with people they shouldn’t, and from time to time mading a fart joke, but that didn’t sit well with a lot of fanboys. I remember people posting about burning his books in his front yard. Really grown up, that was. His ousting (in my opinion) was a clear example of why comics haven’t been allowed to “grow up” in the eyes of the outside media. Austen IS a grown up, and a damn smart one, too. I personally would hire him to write for any project I have, if the opportunity ever arises.

Snikt Snakt said, on 3/19/2013 9:00:00 AM

c’mon Chuck, you can come up with a better alias then ‘Christopher Moonlight’…

Jason Green said, on 3/19/2013 10:20:00 AM

Snikt Snakt: That’s a joke, right? I mean, Christopher Moonlight has been posting here even longer than I have, which is well over 5 years at this point. If he’s been cultivating that username for all this time just so he could stick up for himself anonymously today, that’d be one helluva long term plan.

I really enjoyed that Austen essay. I’ve never really understood the Austen hate either, but that’s as somebody with pretty limited experience with his stuff…a very brief JLA run that was decent but not anything to write home about, and Boys of Summer, which I actually really enjoyed, and was really bummed I never got to read more of. Glad he’s found a way to keep his career going.

Bill K. said, on 3/19/2013 5:34:00 PM

It must be a joke, because anyone who has read the Draco knows that Chuck Austen could never come up with such a brilliant plot…

Harry said, on 3/20/2013 12:16:00 AM

I’ve read the whole article and it’s very good.

Kudos for Austen for finding something to do that is more constructive than the crap he wrote in comics all those years, after all the downs in his life.
He may not be the Antichrist some are describing him as such, but his writing on the superhero genre was atrocious.

Of course, the situation in the big 2 hasn’t improved after he left the field, so it wasn’t just him.

Again, very nice and inspiring article from an otherwise very poor writer.

Harry said, on 3/20/2013 12:18:00 AM

I’ve read the whole article and it’s very good.

Kudos for Austen for finding something to do that is more constructive than the crap he wrote in comics all those years, after all the downs in his life.
He may not be the Antichrist some are describing him as such, but his writing on the superhero genre was atrocious.

Of course, the situation in the big 2 hasn’t improved after he left the field, so it wasn’t just him.

Again, very nice and inspiring article from an otherwise very poor writer.

James T said, on 3/20/2013 6:27:00 AM

Austen wrote some of the worst books I’ve ever read at Marvel. That being said..I’m glad he is successful..away from comics.

James T said, on 3/20/2013 6:28:00 AM

Austen wrote some of the worst books I’ve ever read at Marvel. That being said..I’m glad he is successful..away from comics.

Padraig O Mealoid said, on 3/20/2013 6:38:00 AM

Good piece by Austen. ‘Suck it up and walk away’ is never bad advice, if you can’t change something.

‘Now, Chuck Austen has been many thing in comics, from his early days drawing Miracleman (our own Padraig will certainly mention him anon) …

Yes, I certainly shall! As an artist, certainly on MM, I think the kindest think I could say is that he wasn’t a great fit, and was a bit jarring following Alan Davis’s work. I think I may have a quote from Dez Skinn about him, too. All shall be revealed, eventually…

Also – and call me picky, if you will – why are you illustrating an article about Chuck Austen with a MM cover by Timothy Truman?

As we’ve been noting, of late the ashes of Tokyopop have been stirring, and several volumes that were thought lost are actually coming out in one shape or another. BIZENGHAST #8 by M. Alice “Marty” LeGrow is the latest book to find a new life as a print-to-order book via The Right Stuf and digitally through Graphicly. BIZENGHAST was one of the most successful of all Tokyopop’s homegrown manga (as making it to volume 8 would indicate) and it’s been spun off into an art book, coloring book, novelization, animated shorts, merchandise, and a tabletop role-playing game, according to ICv2.

“I DO receive royalties from this book just like all the others,” LeGrow said. “I was paid in full for the entire volume before Tokyopop stopped publishing, and in fact have been offered (and completed) extra work to do ancillary art and the book layout, for which I was very generously compensated by Tokyopop… Tokyopop has always dealt fairly with me in their contracts and there’s no reason to think they won’t continue to do so.” LeGrow created new art for the splash page and art for the postcard that’s free with purchase.

M. Alice LeGrow: I never really thought of myself as "the vanguard," really…I think American-made manga style comics are really in more of a resurgence now, since titles like GoldDigger and the like have been around so much longer. It was early manga-influenced comics like that that really encouraged me when I was young, and made me want to become a comic artist myself. As for the debate on "Japanese/non-Japanese," I can only speak for myself and say that I never really felt my work was truly trying to be manga, per se. I feel that I was heavily influenced by it, especially when I was younger, but now I'm settling on a style that is a hybrid of many different influences. For everyone else involved in that argument, I say just draw your comics, throw 'em into stores and let the world sort it out.

LeGrow’s next project is THE ELEPHANT BOOK, which was funded through Kickstarter and tells the story of two youngsters named Williams and Fairfax who get caught in a conspiracy while living in Philadelphia.

0 Comments on Final volume of BIZENGHAST to come out after all as of 6/1/2012 5:33:00 PM

After hinting at it on their Facebook page for a while, Tokyopop’s surviving member, Stuart Levy, announced a little wee return…as a licensing entity, anyway. The Right Stuff, in conjunction with Gentosha Comics, will republish three volumes of Himaruya Hidekaz’s HETALIA: AXIS POWERS, including the first two—which came out from Toykopop before it imploded last year—and the never-before-in-English third book, which was in production when Tpop went away.
HETALIA was one of Tpop’s late hit pick-ups, a satirical look at World War II’s Axis powers as a bunch of snotty boys. The popularity of the book has led to a lot of cosplay, which looks a little alarming but isn’t really about dressing as the Gestapo.

The Tokoyopop daily mailer reveaeld more release details; although a limited number of all three books will be available—with 8 pages in color—after the initial print run, the books will be POD only, and without that color insert.

Patience is a virtue and, believe us when we say this, you guys are perhaps the most virtuous fans out there. It is with great pleasure that we're able to announce that we have partnered with Gentosha Comics and Right Stuf, Inc. to publish Hetalia Axis Powers, Vol. 3 in English-translated book form for the first time ever.

In addition, reprints of the first two volumes will be available exclusively through RightStuf.com. Volume 3's first print run, which features an exclusive eight-page color insert from the original Japanese manga, will be available in late June 2012 and is available for pre-order at a reduced price of $10.99. That translates to 30% savings for 100% brand new Hetalia, which ain't too shabby.

Despite the overwhelming demand by fans for us to bring back Hetalia, it should be noted that we have adopted a print-on-demand model for publishing this volume. As the first run will have limited quantities, pre-ordering is highly recommended or else you may find that copies have run out faster than Italy can introduce Germany's face to his palm. Plus subsequent volumes won't come with those swanky full-color pages. For those of you who can't wait til June for your Hetalia fix or need to brush up on your history, the first two volumes are available immediately for $15.99. We guarantee it's at least three times more fun than reading The Economist.

Stay tuned for more details on our publishing operations as they emerge and join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus pages. Never before has history been so fun and we're happy to be a part of history in the making by bringing Hetalia, Vol. 3 to our English-speaking fans. We've got to say, it's good to be back, TOKYOPOP fam, and your patience and support means the world to us. Go ahead, say it with us now: "PASTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

As the mailer hints, this might not be the only former Tokyopop title that we’ll see resurrected this way. It does seem like a sensible way to provide the fans who were clamoring for thes

4 Comments on Tokyopop is sorta back with Hetalia: Axis Powers, last added: 5/6/2012

Interesting… is this the first major publisher to offer books via Print-On-Demand technology?

Kai-Steffen Schwarz said, on 5/3/2012 2:41:00 PM

I don’t know about the States, but at least in Germany, a few bigger publishers have used POD technology for some manga titles with limited demand (new books as well as reprints).

Serhend Sirkecioglu said, on 5/3/2012 3:46:00 PM

well given that TP is mostly dead(apparently) this seems to be the cheapest way for Stu to fund his kooky endeavors…what happened to that tsunami-quake-meltdown documentary?

Xenos said, on 5/4/2012 2:44:00 PM

Back when Tokyopop was big in publishing manga.. and back when I had a blog on a comics site for a bit.. I was a huge critic of their pusblishing practices, marketing, and general attitude toward the industry and medium.

Now it seems they just refuse to stay dead. They are going to hold onto their pruor liscencing deal to get every drop of blood out of it. Too bad a better US publisher didn’t get the rights.

Now I am a bit torn. Some friends love the series and I am normally for politically incorrect humor. Yet with Japan’s history of denying WWII atrocities and some fans showing ignorance and entitlement with the while giving a salute while dressed as Germany.. including over Passover weekend outside one con.. I am not sure what to make of this book and its fandom.

Plus, back to Tokyopop, they screwed over numerous US creators. Those books are tied up in legal limbo with Tokyopop greedily desiring their creator to contiue the book only for them to jump in and suck up money for movie deals. Considering what an unrelatwd turd they made of Priest.. I have no hope there.

GeekChicDaily, the daily nerd news email, is launching an edition for New York, and also teaming with the Tokyopop brand for a special edition spotlighting Japanese culture trends and news.

The New York edition will cover the Big Apple’s lively offerings in geek culture, following localized versions for LA and a national edition. GeekChicDaily also added Microsoft’s Mich Mathews to its board of directors.

Teasings of the Tokyopop edition had excited fans to think they were returning to publishing, but the Tokyopop Facebook page quelled the rumors:

Loyal Fans, we’re very thrilled by your excitement but need to clarify: unfortunately we are not re-launching the manga – those properties have reverted to their owners and are amazingly difficult to get back. We’re launching an all new editorial TOKYOPOP newsletter about all things otaku and Asian pop-culture, powered by our friends at GeekChicDaily. We think you’ll really enjoy the news we’ll be bringing and apologize for the initial misunderstanding.

PR below:

Following the explosive growth of the National and Los Angeles regional editions, GeekChicDaily, the leading pop culture, opt-in email newsletter and cross-platform content publisher, today announced its expansion into the New York market and the upcoming launch of special edition “TOKYOPOP Powered by GeekChicDaily.”

With a focus on events and pop culture influencers in the NY Metro area, GeekChicDaily’s New York Edition will continue to deliver a daily dose of popular culture, from comics to video games, film, television, toys, collectibles and applications, alongside multi-platform media partner and nerdcore site, Nerdist. In addition to editorial coverage, the company will also co-host local events that help New Yorkers feed their inner geeks whether on the web or on the town. To sign up, visit http://bit.ly/rqP3hs. Official launch partners include Street Fighter® X Tekken®, AMC’s The Walking Dead, Toyota, and OtterPops.

“Servicing the biggest media market in the world has always been a top priority and following the overwhelming enthusiasm from our National edition and GeekChicLA audience, New York was an obvious next step,” said GeekChicDaily Co-Founder and CEO Peter Y. Levin.

GeekChicDaily has also partnered with TOKYOPOP, the major publisher that popularized manga in the West to produce a special edition powered by GeekChicDaily that will cover the hottest Asian pop culture news and trends. “TOKYOPOP Powered by GeekChicDaily” is an evolution of the original TOKYOPOP magazine a decade ago, which featured Asian Pop Culture lifestyle, including manga, anime, gaming, music, cos-play, gadgets, celebrities and more. The magazine and online companion reached over 100K + subscribers. While TOKYOPOP was forced to discontinue its North American manga publishing operations in Spring 2011 due to the declining book retail environment, “TOKYOPOP powered by GeekChicDaily” revives the TOKYOPOP brand in an exciting way, leveraging its substantial social media footprint to tie the Asian-infused content across multiple platforms.

“GeekChicDaily and its daily, opt-in format provide the perfect opportunity to revive the original TOKYOPOP magazine Asian P

I thought Tokyopop retained the rights to the original english-language manga they published (stuff like Bizenghast, Dramacon, etc.)

rinsmith said, on 10/13/2011 6:45:00 AM

Actually, Tokyopop recently announced they will be relaunching the manga. Or will try to, at least. As a manga fan, I have mixed feelings. Stu Levy left a bad taste in our mouths.

Xenos said, on 10/16/2011 1:27:00 AM

For heaven’s sake, TokyoPop. Die already.

They stumbled upon the magic size and price point for manga sales in America, causing a boom. Yet then they flooded the market. They pretended their amateur US comics were on the same level with big budget Japanese books run by big name artists with many assistants. Never mind they chased a number of good US artists away. Shat all over the creators they hired. Eventually lost better Japanese titles to better publishers. Wasted money on a reality show starring their egomaniac CEO Stu Levy. Never mind all the other pet projects where he stole the spotlight.

Let Stu try to break into the music and movie industry. That’s where DJ Milky wants to be. Leave manga / comics to people who care about them. Stick to being a music scene poser tossing around marketing bs and let literate people publish books.

Of course that’s if any Japanese publisher will deal with them. Or if they try to pull that OEL manga scam again, if any American creator will bother if they know what’s good for them.

Ganta’s desperate struggle for survival continues as the second round of the Carnival of Corpses kicks off, but when he is matched against Minatsuki, Ganta learns that his new friends are not what they seem…and it may cost him his life! Yo, having infiltrated Ward G, trespasses into the ring and reveals that Minatsuki is his sister. Although memories of Ganta’s childhood friend, Shiro, return to him when he needs it the most, his savior may prove to be a devil in disguise. This downward spiral into the insanity of "Deadman Wonderland" holds startling revelations!

Review:

Deadman Wonderland is the perfect example of one of the reasons I feel like I have lost my manga mojo. I was thoroughly enjoying this action-packed sci-fi series when its US publisher, Tokyopop, abruptly shut their doors for business. Stu Levy, per his own infamous Tweet, was bored with the publishing industry. Books were too old-school for him, so he turned his back on all of his fans and totally rained on their parade. Bye-bye almost ten years’ worth of collecting the old fashioned, boring books his publishing company had been blitzing the market with. Bye-bye series that I had come to love and anticipate, and in part prompted me to start this blog in the first place. Ouch! Talk about a slap in the face…

Deadman Wonderland is the type of series I didn’t have much interest in when I first heard about it. I’m not a big fan of horror yarns or stories with graphic violence, though after taking a look at some of the titles I am following, I am going to have to admit that I do like some of these kinds of books. While this title doesn’t have a lot of over the top violence, it does offer its fair share of blood sprays, explosions, and destructive combat scenes. After reading the first volume, I was hooked. How is Ganta going to survive and get out of Deadman Wonderland? Will he survive the Carnival of Corpses? At first glance, it doesn’t seem that he will survive very long, with his skinny frame and gullible nature. Better for US fans if he had only lived the span of four graphic novels – we wouldn’t have been left hanging when yet another manga publisher shuttered their offices.

This volume has Ganta facing off against Yo’s sister in the second round of the Carnival of Corpses. Minatsuki is a psychopath, and she gets off on lying and killing. Her hair is her deadly weapon, and she can whip her opponents to bloody ribbons with about as much effort as it takes a normal person to yawn. Their battle gets off to a fierce and furious start, and it looks like Ganta’s going to go down fast. Then Yo arrives to complicate matters even more for the hapless Ganta.

I like this series, and I don’t know why. The action is mind-numbing, the plot is erratic, and most of the characters are one-dimensional. Still, there are enough twists and suspense to keep me turning the pages. I like Ganta quite a bit, and I want him to survive, to find out why he’s in DW, and to somehow find freedom for himself. I also like Shiro. I want to know everything about her. A fe

When last we saw former Tokyopop owner and publisher Stu Levy, he was in Japan, sleeping in a truck on his way to deliver food to the victims of the March 11th Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that left parts of the country devastated. At the same time that Toykopop was shutting down for good, Levy announced his intention to spend a year making a documentary about the disaster and the survivors’ heroic efforts to help others through the tough times.

Well, now there’s a trailer for this documentary and a Kickstarter page looking to raise $20,000 for post (color grading, etc) and marketing for the film, whose purpose he explains thusly:

I believe we can help heal these wounds by paying tribute to the amazing resilience and quiet spirit of the many victims and volunteers of Tohoku. By letting them know we admire and respect them, we encourage them to continue the good fight – at a time when even the strongest warriors would grow weary.

We also gain insight into how our own inner strength can help us if we ever find ourselves in a life-threatening situation. I believe we can all learn from these incredible heroes.

There’s also a Facebook page supporting the project. Some may find some irony in Levy’s turning to crowd funding now that his own publishing empire has gone to ground, but clearly there are good intentions here. Maybe Levy can also help out some people closer to home by giving them back the rights to their creations one of these days?

I don’t mean to always hate on Levy, but does it strike anyone else as odd that the guy behind one of the most successful publishing operations of the past ten years doesn’t have 20 Gs laying around to make his own damn movie and instead is grubbing for cash on Kickstarter like a college kid trying to put out an 80-page comic on his own? I mean, this is kind of insane, right? Good vibes for Japan aside, is there any practical reason any of us should give him any money?

Angelica Brenner said, on 8/3/2011 3:32:00 PM

Agreed. That $20,000 would be better spent going directly towards relief efforts, not filtered through a project by the guy whose previous film efforts are limited to direct-to-video oddities and one of this year’s biggest box-office duds.

Although the news coming on a Friday afternoon news dump did dampen response a bit, there has been a ton of reaction to Toykopop shutting down its US publishing activities.

On the America’s Greatest Otaku website, Tpop publisher Stuart Levy recently wrote about his plans to move to Japan and make a documentary, surely not the thoughts of a man looking to revitalize his publishing plan.

for the next year of my life I will be living in Miyagi making a documentary about the tragedy and how the Japanese people are overcoming it and rebuilding their lives. It will be a very challenging and difficult project but I am dedicated to making it happen – and all proceeds from the film will be donated to Miyagi.

Honestly, all of your passion and love for Japan have kept me going, even when times are tough. I very much appreciate your support – of the manga, shows and culture I’ve been fortunate to bring to America.

On his Facebook page, VP Mike Kiley today wrote:

A lot will be written today but one thing above all else should never be forgotten, and it is the one thing above all else I will treasure for the rest of my life: the privilege over the past 13 years of working with the most amazing, talented, bat-shit crazy editors, marketeers, salesfolk, accountants, designers, and production mgrs … the staff of TOKYOPOP!!!

Levy had more terrific ideas in a week than I’ll have in five years, but it often seemed like good initiatives never got the financial support or managerial oversight they needed in order to succeed. The TOKYOPOP website is a telling example: at the height of MySpace fever, Levy re-imagined the company’s web page as a social network where teenagers could share pictures, discuss manga and anime, and post fan fiction. Yet no one at TOKYOPOP anticipated the need for site moderators to remove copyright-protected material, prevent flame wars, or curate worthwhile content. As a result, the site quickly degenerated into a semi-literate mess, with high school students excoriating their French teachers and sharing tips on where to read illegal scans of favorite manga.

But she also notes that it is a difficult time for publishing in general.

Almost all of the manga publishers that have folded in the last three years were small, independent companies that lacked the monetary resources to compete for A-list licenses and subsidize operations. That TOKYOPOP persisted as long as it did is testament to the quality of its books, and to the loyalty it engendered in fans whose first manga were Sailor Moon, Magic Knight Rayearth, and Parasyte.

Heaven help me, I own every single one of the manga series pictured here. Yes. Even that horrible cine-manga BS with Paris Hilton which is no more a manga than if I photocopied my read end and drew a word balloon on it. I bought it on clearance as historical evidence of what utter garbage TokyoPop stamped the word manga onto. Talk about brand dilution. Not that the word manga should ever had been a brand like TokyoPop was making of it. Just another word for comics, folks.

Meanwhile I only bought one issue of Love Hina. Yes, issue. Back when TokyoPop was trying to hook US readers, they had their early titles as floppies. This was when they went from Mixx to TokyoPop. This was followed by the trade collection format we all see today. Of course Viz and Dark Horse were already doing this as well. The manga big bang hit when TokyoPop dropped the price and size and pushed into stores like the late Borders.

kris devereux said, on 4/16/2011 8:42:00 AM

heck i can remember when the floppys for love hina came out which did floor me at the time, course if i remember right tokyo pop issued them day and date with the release of vol 1 of the trade heck the very first week tp re-lunched they’re manga line i’d gotten cowboy bebop v 1 and love hina v 1, but what about Hetalia is it moving to a new publisher which it SHOULD by the way

Maximo Lorenzo’s shared some of the TP history he experienced- adds some background information as to what TP succeeded at, troubles with their OEL line, and the film shenanigans [including claims that they used profits from publishing to fuel the film stuff, even when pub was having issues]

Years ago I took one of TokyoPop’s old flyers promoting their ‘manga revolution’ that I had kept and did a segment by segment analysis of it and how skewed their double speak was. I posted it on a blog back in the day, sadly on a site that’s long gone and eaten up by another site so badly integrated that even I couldn’t find my blog. I might still have the scans and text somewhere. I never drank their manga flava Kool Aid and they never really promoted a number of good books they had that I did think were wonderful.

Xenos said, on 4/17/2011 2:03:00 AM

Poo. I forgot to add my reply about those floppies. Now that you mention it, I remember that. The floppies didn’t last very long. Then again simply emulating a publishing format isn’t going to get stubborn American comic fans to try your Japanese books. Same way their OEL Manga failure tried to superficially emulate the format TokyoPop was publishing manga in. They weren’t fooling die hard manga fans into reading American books. As someone who enjoys books from both shores, I know it’s a frustrating problem, but TokyoPop’s solution was very shallow.

To be fair, not that most of the industry has too many good ideas on it either. I asked Jim Lee at a con recently about DC tapping into the huge numbers, like the ones at the anime con the week before which beat the ones at the comic con we were at. Someone had already asked about Minx. And he pretty much said DC really didn’t know how to reach them.

Mike Pascale said, on 4/17/2011 3:07:00 PM

Sorry to see them go, even if the only manga I’ve ever purchased was MIXXzine #1 (which, sadly, I can’t even sell for a dollar at a garage sale). Some of the artwork was gorgeous and their books always seemed to garner plenty of shelf space as well as accolades.

Having been a publisher myself, I know it ain’t easy. I only wish there was more information about the decision behind the closure, so that OTHERS may learn from their mistakes and circumstances.

The comics publishing culling of 2011 claimed its most prominent victim as it was announced today that Tokyopop is shutting down its US operations, as of May 31. The German office will stay open to handle publishing rights and the film division will continue.

Founded in 1997, Tokyopop and its founder Stu Levy were at the forefront of the manga revolution in the US, introducing such hits as Sailor Moon, Chobits and Love Hina to the US market in the “unflipped” format for the first time.

Sales surged as the manga bookstore revolution took over in the early part of the last decade. An ambitious program of publishing original manga by creators from around the world — many of them barely out of the teenaged readership years themselves — proved controversial and ultimately saw only a handful of successful franchises but introduced a new generation of creators to the comics scene.

In February, a last round of lay-offs had reduced the company to a mere 6 employees…making the shut down all but inevitable.

For nearly 15 years, TOKYOPOP, led by Stu Levy, its founder, CEO and Chief Creative Officer, has pioneered the English-language manga movement and touched the hearts, minds and souls of enthusiasts worldwide.

Today, we are sad to inform our loyal community of manga fans, our passionate creators of manga content, our business and retail partners, and other stakeholders who have supported us through the years that as of May 31, 2011, TOKYOPOP is closing its Los Angeles-based North American publishing operations.

TOKYOPOP film and television projects and European operations, including the German publishing program, will not be affected by the Los Angeles office closure. In addition, TOKYOPOP will continue its global rights sales via its office in Hamburg, Germany.

And

A personal message from Stu Levy

Author: Stu Levy

April 15, 2011

Dear TOKYOPOP Community:

Way back in 1997, we set out to bring a little-known form of Japanese entertainment to American shores. I originally named our little company “Mixx”, meaning a mix of entertainment, mix of media, and mix of cultures. My dream was to build a bridge between Japan and America, through the incredible stories I discovered as a student in Tokyo.

Starting with just four titles — Parasyte, Ice Blade, Magic Knight Rayearth, and, of course, Sailor Moon — we launched MixxZine, aspiring to introduce comics to girls. These four series laid down the cornerstone for what would eventually become TOKYOPOP and the Manga Revolution.

Over the years, I’ve explored many variations of manga culture – “OEL” manga, “Cine-Manga”, children’s books we called “Manga Chapters”, the Gothic-Lolita Bible, Korean manwha (which we still called “manga” at the time), video game soundtracks, live-action films and documentaries, anime, and various merchandise. Some of it worked, some o

15 Comments on End of an era: Tokyopop shutting down US publishing division, last added: 4/15/2011

“TOKYOPOP film and television projects and European operations, including the German publishing program, will not be affected by the Los Angeles office closure. In addition, TOKYOPOP will continue its global rights sales via its office in Hamburg, Germany.”

Or in other words, “Do we own a majority share in your comic? Don’t think that this means you have a chance of being able to buy it back. We’ll still hang onto it in the hope that someone wants to option it as a television series or a movie.”

*sigh*

And of course, this also means no more Aria, unless a third publisher picks it up…

Andre said, on 4/15/2011 11:14:00 AM

Everyone who reads pirated manga scans and hosts them on their websites, everyone who stole manga off store shelves, everyone who shit on artists who made their own manga, and the assorted parade of CEO’s who helmed Borders into oblivion over the past few years- screw you all.

Sorry for that emotional outburst, and I imagine there were other factors, but sad to see a publisher close, sad to see freelancers lose their jobs, and this makes the previous round of layoffs all the more depressing/awful.

Sad to see Tokyopop go. Whatever people say about them, they put out a lot of great books, and did some good things.

Here’s hoping Kodansha, VIZ, Yen and Vertical keep up the good work, and manga pirates burn in hell.

ps– and don’t say they should of done digital- they were doing digital 10 years ago. Digital isn’t the magic bullet that’ll save comics. Though I hope it helps VIZ survive the storm.

Andre said, on 4/15/2011 11:20:00 AM

Greg- Yeah, I do hope they revert publishing rights at the very least back to creators if they’re truly shuttering their publishing division. It would be a shame if DramaCon and the Dreaming went OOP forever. The right issues was something TP didn’t do right, hope they clear it up.

But yeah, still sad about it all, and today is not a day to tell me about how awesome scanlations are and I shouldn’t nitpick you for it.

Charles Skaggs said, on 4/15/2011 11:39:00 AM

I hope this means arrangements can be made for someone else to finally publish GYAKUSHU! Volume 3.

Mark Herr said, on 4/15/2011 12:08:00 PM

I wish Stu Levy nothing but the best. I remember when he came to me with an idea during my days in Diamond’s Purchasing Department. The creator of Sailor Moon was scheduled to be at SDCC and he thought it would be a great idea if we did a limited run Sailor Moon comic with a pink and silver foil cover that would only be sold at the show. Diamond would sell it to retailers on the floor of the con, and they in turn would sell them to the consumers. It was a huge hit all the way around. And I would argue that its success paved the way for convention exclusives in the comic industry.

Jay said, on 4/15/2011 12:21:00 PM

Stunned, just stunned.

Kid Kyoto said, on 4/15/2011 12:23:00 PM

So who else will Borders take down with them?

Swampy said, on 4/15/2011 12:50:00 PM

damn, i’ll never get those last volumes of Dragonhead now.

Hopefully, someone will pick up Lupin the 3rd again.

btre said, on 4/15/2011 1:29:00 PM

Andre
Yeah-yeah. Of course, it is to blame everyone else except yourself. Of course, it had nothing to do with goddamn awful translation, edition, etc., or with stupid fiscal and other decisions. And, of course it had nothing to do with financial crisis in US.

Azurite said, on 4/15/2011 1:39:00 PM

Tokyopop may have brought a lot of manga stateside, but they took a while before they stopped editing and flipping pages and generally making a mess of some of the series they got licenses for. Will I miss them? A little, yeah. But the manga and anime industry-hell, Japan-anything-is nothing if not resiliant. I believe other manga publishers and distributors can come out of this strong and learn from Tokyopop’s costly mistakes.

SRT said, on 4/15/2011 1:48:00 PM

Torsten’s “Although I was never a big fan of Tokyopop…” does far more to explain the consistently questionable business decisions that led to this moment than anything else.

It rode the coattails of its initial success without the wisdom or ability to build on it. Other factors just aggravated an already doomed lack of intelligent market strategy. Meanwhile, TP alienated the critics and creators who wanted so badly to root for it.

As for scanlations, when was the last time TP published anything that anyone would even want to read for free?

insaneben said, on 4/15/2011 1:58:00 PM

I’m shocked and saddened, yet somehow, after hearing this past February that they had laid off long-time stalwarts like Lillian Diaz-Pryzbyl (sp?), and that their publishing staff had been reduced to all of six people, I had a feeling it was only a matter of time before their manga division went belly-up.

And yet, they said their European manga division will remain operational. Will this mean they’ll continue to publish books and get a third-party to distribute them? Or will this simply be the last domino to fall before Tokyopop devotes its remaining resources to film (and padding Stu Levy’s bank account)? Only time will tell…

(On a personal note, I’m glad I got the remaining volumes of every other Tokyopop series I wanted… all except for Aria, which, depending on the days and months ahead, may either continue to be published, dropped and rescued by another publisher, or join “Harukaze Bitter Bop” and countless others in licensing limbo. Stay tuned…)

Nick said, on 4/15/2011 2:06:00 PM

“As for scanlations, when was the last time TP published anything that anyone would even want to read for free?”

December 2010, volume two of Hetalia: Axis Powers. Volume three would’ve been May 2011.

(Never liked it myself, but *lots* of people do.)

eallengd said, on 4/15/2011 2:12:00 PM

I don’t know if it’s just me or what, but I feel this whole manga thing is just a fad in North America. My son and his friends were all into this, but according to him they are no longer interested in this material, and they are trying to sell their collections.

Snikt Snakt said, on 4/15/2011 2:24:00 PM

“I don’t know if it’s just me or what, but I feel this whole manga thing is just a fad in North America. My son and his friends were all into this, but according to him they are no longer interested in this material, and they are trying to sell their collections.”

That’s how I felt about Manga too, that it had a finite lifespan here in the U.S.

The few Manga books I tried out all had two things in common: great artwork and lousy stories/writing.

• ECCC news: The initial launch of the BOOM!/Fox Atomic partnership will be an ongoing 28 DAYS LATER comic:

Initial launch story will be firmly based in 28 DAYS LATER continuity with the first arc focusing on Selena. Bridging the gap between 28 DAYS LATER and 28 WEEKS LATER, a few key questions will be answered along the way: what happened to Selena after 28 DAYS LATER? How did Selena happen upon the machete she wields in 28 DAYS LATER?

The creative team wasn’t mentioned, but the Tim Bradstreet (Above) and Sean Phillips(Below) cover art that came with the PR is a good start.

• ECCC News: Writer/Artist Rick Remender has signed an exclusive with Marvel, where he’s writing PUNISHER. The article doesn’t mention any exceptions for his creators-owned books like FEAR AGENT and THE END LEAGUE, so one assumes those are on hold for now.

The first thing we need to do is acknowledge that the online readership of many print comics is larger than the paid physical readership. .CBRs are popular, as are torrents. No two ways about it. You have to accept you have a problem before you can deal with it.

The second thing we need to do is understand what revenue models work for webcomics and why. If the print publishers need to get into digital distribution, reinventing the wheel is folly, and potentially dangerous.

The new manga is called Boys Be 2009 1 and as far as I can tell is an updated version of the original 1991 manga, revolving around students dealing with both platonic and romantic relationships in their daily lives, particularly average-guy Kyouichi Kanzaki and his childhood friend Chihara Nitta.

I’m assuming the price increase won’t be accompanied by any additions to the manga volumes, like better paper stock or color inserts. It would be interesting if Tokyopop followed a page from DC’s recent playbook and offset the price increase with backup features. Like DC, Tokyopop could use the price increase as an opportunity to publish fan favorites that don’t sell well enough to justify individual publication. It’d be especially interesting if Tokyopop used such backups to complete the many OEL series stuck in publishing limbo. Of course, you’d run the risk of fans complaining about charging more for series they don’t want to read, but if the prices were going to go up anyway, I assume most fans would rather get something additional rather than nothing at all.

Graham released “King City” Vol. 1 in 2007 through American manga publisher TOKYOPOP, and gained an Eisner nomination for Best Writer/Artist - Humor in 2008. The company planned to follow it up with Vol. 2, only to cancel the release as part of blanket cuts made to their digest-sized American OGN line. To add insult to injury, Graham was already around 130 pages into drawing the book when he found out TOKYOPOP wouldn’t be releasing it, and they weren’t willing to give him back the rights to the property so he could take it somewhere else.

Enter Image Comics. There’s something that sets Image apart from most other contemporary comics companies, according to Graham: they make comics. “They don’t do movies or video games, they just want to publish comics,” Graham said. Image’s “comics first” mentality made them specially-suited to print “King City,” while letting TOKYOPOP hold onto the actual rights to the book.

Hm, now why would Tokyopop have no interest in publishing something that is so valuable that they would never give up the movie rights? Does that make sense?

After that, there was a short statement about how this is a year of “refocusing and reorganizing” for Tokyopop. They have about half as many titles now as a year ago in order to better focus on “what we think can be successful in a slow market”. They want to regroup and regrow to be in a better position to handle what’s going on in the economy. In terms of causes for this change in strategy, returns had a big impact on them, because “the book market works on consignment”. Most of their audience shops at Barnes & Noble and Borders, and spring 2008 brought “massive waves of returns”. Now, they’re working on controlling inventory and being much more careful about what is printed.

§ Speaking of Tokyopop, SHUTTERBOX by Tavicat, a pioneering work of Ameri-manga is now back in the hands of the creators, according to a post by Rikki Simons, and they are shopping it around; four volumes were printed; a fifth volume is completed and awaiting publication:

In answer to the numerous inquiries from some of the ShutterBox series’ many fans: YES, we are now actively seeking a way to continue the series, both to publish the new volumes, and to republish the now out of print earlier volumes. We are open to and exploring both traditional publishing or through new methods. Interested publishers can e-mail me at rikki@rikkisimons.com and I’ll forward any proposals to Ken, or can contact Ken directly at KenFLevin@gmail.com.

ShutterBox, the first American series published by Tokyopop (2003), is a high fantasy romance about a young lady named Megan Amano, who, when she dreams, is transported to an afterlife world where she attends school as the only living exchange student in a school for muses.

“I have a bit of that going on with the comic book character Lobo. I find it much easier to write comic books than lyrics, actually, because it’s a natural dialogue,” Ian said. “Writing song lyrics is not natural, but over the years, I know what I need to know to get it done. I find it quite easy to capture a character and use my own personality and humor.”

So, I guess the two-issue series WON’T be about Lobo getting in touch with his feminine side after all. Rats.

At least one source says Ian is the lead singer. I didn’t know Alex Ross was involved with the group:

Which is why we were happy to have the opportunity to interview Scott Ian, lead singer, bald man, and all-around badass. Find out what Scott thinks of Motorhead and how Alex Ross came to create cover art for Anthrax’s latest album.

Jason Thibault said, on 7/10/2009 1:32:00 PM

The Scott Ian Lobo story may be interesting. He was the most unabashed musician-as-comic-fan back in the 1980’s. Used to have Judge Dredd plastered all over his guitars.

And as previously mentioned, a badass rhythm guitarist but not the singer of Anthrax.

Ed said, on 7/10/2009 2:14:00 PM

Actually the lead singers were/are Joey Belladonna>JohnBush>Joey Belladonna> Some New Guy.

Al said, on 7/10/2009 2:31:00 PM

Yay about Tony DeZuniga.

The Beat said, on 7/10/2009 3:09:00 PM

I actually knew that about Ian, but obviously, my headbanging days are pretty hazy right about now.

That said, I was craving some Ministry this morning!

Filip Sablik said, on 7/10/2009 3:12:00 PM

Lobo plus Sam Keith plus Anthrax? Sounds like fun!

Mike said, on 7/10/2009 4:42:00 PM

Wait, Tony DeZuniga is the lead singer for Anthrax?

Rivkah said, on 7/10/2009 11:48:00 PM

“NBM is bringing Guido Crepax’s sexy adaptation of The Story of O back into print.”

And I was just looking for work of this marvelous artist! Not his best, IMHO, but it’s wonderful to see interest reawakened and to actually have the opportunity to see his work in print.

Joe Willy said, on 7/11/2009 3:50:00 PM

I don’t have Crepax’s version of The Story O. I do have his version of Venus and Furs and an Emmanuelle volume. I do have a version of Dorothy Kloster’s photo-illustrated version- might be interesting to compare the two.

Yes, Scott Ian and Anthrax have always been HUGE comic fans. Surprised this didn’t happen sooner. Not to mention I can’t believe DC really doesn’t use Lobo much these days.

Heidi, you’re doing more PR for SDCC than whoever does PR for SDCC. Seems like they’d have a blog where most of the who’s booth is where “announcements” should go.

The Japanese publisher Kodansha, from whom TOKYOPOP has licensed many terrific series over the years — Chobits, Love Hina, Samurai Deeper Kyo, Rave Master, Initial D, Kindaichi, Life, GetBackers, and Love Attack, to name a few — has decided to let all existing contracts with TOKYOPOP expire on all manga series that they have licensed to us. As a result, Kodansha will not renew any licenses with TOKYOPOP for any new manga volumes. What does this mean? TOKYOPOP will not be allowed to complete the publication of any series that is currently in progress; in addition, TOKYOPOP will not be allowed to reprint titles after the current inventory has been sold out, so once these series are sold out at retail, they will not be available for consumers to purchase. The reasons for Kodansha’s decision were not communicated to TOKYOPOP.

We have received many emails and phone calls about titles related to this announcement, and given the nature of the negotiations, we could not definitely answer any of those questions until now. We love all of these series, and we are disappointed that we will not get to enjoy the outcome of some of our favorite manga. We hope to see these series completed some day…. However, if they are ever published again, they will not be published by TOKYOPOP.

David Welsh has the complete list of Kodansha licenses, including the manga blockbusters that put Tokyopop on the map, like Chobits and Love, Hina, and such critical darlings as Dragon Head and Planetes, all of which are now or soon will be out of print. Deb Aoki has the list of unfinished series and a follow up post with the status of Kodansha’s various licenses. Some have been picked up by other publishers — Dark Horse is putting out omnibus editions of Clover and Chobits, and Del Rey picked up Parasyte — but the big news concerns Kodansha’s long-awaited entrance into the American market as its own publisher.

The manga which Kodansha will be publishing in North America (see “No More Kodansha Manga for Tokyopop” and “Kodansha Titles Turn Up on Amazon”) will be distributed through Random House. There had been some speculation that the Kodansha titles would be published as an imprint of Random; we’ve confirmed that the relationship will be for distribution.

Titles coming from Kodansha includes new editions of Akira and Ghost in the Shell, according to Amazon listings ferreted out by astute fans, but other details are speculative. While the manga market has softened up since the economic downturn, Kodansha’s entrance will surely boost the excitement level a bit with their vast library of worldwide hits.

Meanwhile, what about Tokyopop? The company has been seen as staging a bit of a comeback after a rough year or so which saw big layoffs. They recently announced new fall titles, including Domo, a new Hack and more. Although some saw the Kodansha defection as a body blow, this Anime Vice interview with Tpop spokesperson Kasia Piekarz reveals that they must have seen it coming and had some kind of plan in place:

Anime Vice: Was Kodansha’s move expected, or was it an unpleasant surprise?

Kasia Piekarz: It wasn’t completely unexpected as we haven’t licensed anything new from Kodansha in quite some time. What surprised us most was that they cancelled licenses for series that were almost finished, such as Samurai Deeper Kyo and Rave Master. From a fan and collector’s perspective, that doesn’t make sense to us.

AV: What are TOKYOPOP’s plans in the wake of this? Will TOKYOPOP be cutting down on its release schedule, or will we see them ramping up licenses from other publishers and on original works instead?

KP: As I say above, at this point, we actually didn’t have a lot of new Kodansha titles on our list, even with the continuing volumes. We were down to a handful a month, if that. So, no new changes aside from those that have already happened prior to this announcement.

Even when you see a truck barreling down on you, you can only brace for impact so much. In some ways, it’s a sad story. Seven years ago, Tokyopop flipped their manga and created a revolution that rearranged bookstores and helped pave the way for the graphic novel boom in general. They were the game changers.

And now? As Simon Jonesgently suggests, Kodansha has no reason to explain its rejection of Toykopop:

While things seem to be picking up again for Tokyopop lately, the company had been under the financial weather, amid ongoing turmoil in the book retail market and tightening competition between mid-list manga titles. Kodansha’s own ambitions to expand their international reach is the least well-kept secret in the world at this point. And however rocky the alliance between Kodansha and Random House may have gotten, that seems to be a thing of the past, with Del Rey still acquiring new Kodansha licenses, including series which were initially published by Tokyopop. Dark horse, too, received new Kodansha licenses (perhaps as penance for GitS). Does Kodansha really need to verbalize a reason for letting the TP licenses lapse? No. Surely, in their heart of hearts, TP already knows why. (And, to give comfort to TP fans, they’re probably quite prepared for it.) Kodansha has chosen to place their chips elsewhere… although we may be missing some of the more private nuances, there is no great mystery.

In doing business with Japanese companies, trust and honor are everything and keeping these personal relationships in place trumps any profit motive. That Toykopop has not been able to maintain these relationships is only one of the reasons that their booth at San Diego this year was a couple of tables and not the giant island of past years.

Don MacPherson has been covering the other side of Tokyopop’s publishing of late, namely their once much touted OEL line. In a recent column, he looked at the innovative deal which is seeing Brandon Graham’s KING CITY finishing at Image. KING CITY is one of a number of OEL books that never finished their run at Tpop, Graham himself was the mover for the deal.

“It’s pretty much the same as it always was with Tokyopop. I’m definitely more interested in the long term results of the deal. Hopefully any good sales I get from Image pushing the book will go on to my next Multiple Warheads issues at Oni,” he said, noting that if things proceed as he hopes, he’ll really be able to carve out a satisfying and comfortable career in comics. “Maybe in a couple years I could be comic-book middle class. This paying my rent off of comic books is pretty exciting.”

However, other Tpop OEL creators — Ross Campbell, Eric Wight and Becky Cloonan — are left with unfinished books in limbo:

“No word on The Abandoned. I haven’t talked to Tokyopop in a long time. I think everybody I once knew there has been fired, heh,” Ross Campbell told Eye on Comics. “I’m definitely sort of interested in something like Brandon’s thing with Image, but the difference is that Brandon had already drawn King City Volume 2; it just wasn’t released.”

[snip]“I’m not positive about the specifics of Brandon’s deal, but my impression was that they were for books already finished, which Tokyopop is allowing Image to publish,” Wight said, noting he assumes the Tokyopop/Image deal would see Tokyopop getting any royalties paid by Image.

[snip] Becky Cloonan was already working on the second volume of East Coast Rising when Tokyopop shelved the project. Whether or not the property returns in some form remains to be seen, she said. “I still really love the series (ECR), but when TP cancelled the book, I moved on to other things, she said.

In the same post, MacPherson catches up with Tpop marketing man, Marco Pavia, who says that they are watching sales of King CIty.

Tokyopop also recently announced that other finished but not published OEL titles would go online:

Modernizing the magazine serialization made famous by Charles Dickens, today TOKYOPOP will debut PSY*COMM volume 3, with a new chapter serialized weekly for free until the series concludes its story arc. The launch of this new volume of PSY*COMM marks the debut of TOKYOPOP’s online manga program that will include continuing volumes of BOYS OF SUMMER, EARTHLIGHT, KAT & MOUSE, PANTHEON HIGH, UNDERTOWN, GYAKUSHU, and others.

All in all, it all seems a rather jury-rigged solution for a program that was once — in a very different publishing world — a highly valued part of Tpop’s plans. It’s also one that came in for a lot of criticism for the way it was structured — Tokyopop retained way more of the rights than the creators, with the result that Cloonan, Wight, and Ross have all had to walk away from their creations and move on to other things.

The OEL program saw some bright talents emerge — Svetlana Chmakova, Felipe Smith, Amy Reeder Hadley, Amy Kim Ganter, Josh Elder, Joanna Estep and many more – and as recently noted here, M. Alice LeGrow’s Bizenghast is up to Volume 6. There’s also Princess AI, co-written by company head Stuart Levy and media figure Courtney Love, but that has always been a separate case.

In the positive column, there’s an upcoming PRIEST movie, starring Paul Bettany, Karl Urban and Maggie Q. PRIEST is a Korean manhwa; Tokyopop has the master license for the title in the US, so they should get a nice boost when the film comes out next year.

[…] For more on this see Heidi’s detailed post and Tom’s analysis that yielded this gem: “I think there are three basic issues to track here. The first is what exactly this ends up doing to Tokyopop, which I think maybe no one talked about out loud right away upon yesterday’s news out of a sort of respect for having just watching someone get hit in the stomach by a small truck.” var addthis_pub = ‘’; var addthis_language = ‘en’;var addthis_options = ‘email, favorites, digg, delicious, twitter, google, facebook, reddit, live, more’; […]

Don MacPherson said, on 9/1/2009 7:35:00 PM

I’m honestly astonished that TPop didn’t negotiate a contract ensuring it could run an entire series so as to avoid incomplete runs of various titles.

[…] Reactions and addenda continue to pour in to the news that Kodansha has ended its licenses with Tokyopop. Heidi MacDonald has a very thorough roundup at The Beat, and Tom Spurgeon reflects a bit at The Comics Reporter. At Anime Vice, Gia Manry interviews Tokyopop Marketing Manager Kasia Piekarz but doesn’t get much out of her other than the fact that Tokyopop was ready for this. Sesho adds his commentary on the matter in his latest podcast. […]

Tokyopop held their scheduled webinar on Wednesday and Deb Aoki has a thorough recap, including some old favorite books coming back, but other not coming back, and more .hack and so on. There was some talk of manhwa and classic manga:

Prospects for reviving dormant Korean manhwa titles look dim now, but possibly the only other category of manga that has even fewer prospects for future publication at TokyoPop is older manga or “classic” manga titles.

“If by older titles you mean classic manga, the answer is no,” said Diaz-Przybyl. “The manga audience seems very heavily driven toward what’s the latest and greatest from Japan. I would love to do some classic series; VIZ Media has, and so has Vertical. It’s great to see it out there, and the more manga you read, the more you want to understand where this medium comes from.”

Kodansha pulling all it’s licenses was also discussed, but editor Lillian Diaz-Przbyl mentioned that they had had a lot of time to prepare.

Indeed. A few people have told us that Kodansha announced they were pulling their licenses almost a year ago, and it has been kind of an open secret since then, so they really have had a long time to brace.

Tokyopop have revealed the teaser trailer for their new show debuting on Hulu in December. You can watch the trailer here on YouTube. The show features Tokyopop’s Stu Levy and his team of interns (the Otaku 6) criss-crossing the USA, visiting anime events and trying to find greatest Otaku. What is an Otaku?

Stu Levy: [...] they can be creating their own cosplay, drawing manga, singing karaoke or writing. We delve into creative activity, as well as just loving the culture and being a huge fan. There have been a couple people out there with amazing collections but these people also tend to be designers. It’s kind of amazing that the more otaku somebody is, the more they actually do things in the field, too.

Q: You’re on this tour looking for America’s greatest otaku… so “greatest” means… what? What kind of qualities are you looking for?

Stu Levy: One of the things we’re doing in the show – we’ve come up with something called “six core qualities.” The essence of otaku. We’re learning lessons along the way as we meet otaku. And so those will be the qualities that determine who the greatest otaku are, but they’re kind of abstract concepts.

Perhaps most interesting is Levy’s statement about the inclusion of Tokyopop in the show itself.

Stu Levy: However, we’re not featuring TokyoPop at all. It’s totally, completely neutral. When you watch the show, it could have been produced by anybody. TokyoPop is not even there.

Q: Oh, so you’re not promoting TokyoPop books or products or anything like that?

Stu Levy: It’s kind of an interesting duality, because the tour itself – the bus is TokyoPop, and we’re doing manga events, so we’ll be at Borders and comic conventions, but the show we’re making about otaku. When it’s broadcast later on Hulu, other than the initial TokyoPop logo showing that the we’re the production company, nothing in the show directly TokyoPop-related.

I initially thought this had “car crash” written all over it, but after reading that interview I’m ready to be proven wrong.

Here’s Tokyopop’s info about the show.

The upcoming 8-episode documentary/reality series from TOKYOPOP travels across America – to 20 cities across 12,000 miles – searching for OTAKU CULTURE and America’s Greatest Otaku.

For 7 weeks in summer 2010, Stu Levy, along with road warrior cameraman Dice Kinouchi, and the “Otaku 6″ (college students) Dre, Diana, Dominique, Meera, Stephan & Sully, visited all kinds of cool “otaku spots” in each city, and of course interview Greatest Otaku candidates. This was all filmed and documented and will now be presented on Hulu, beginning December 2010.

This is a serious but fun look at America’s otaku culture – made by otakus for otakus.

Geez. Stu Levy and his Mangophile TokyoPop bs is getting a reality show? Geez. There’s nothing about this that sounds good. Though in terms of watching a train wreck, it might be interesting. It’s like painful IQ smashing The Jersey Shore for anime fans.

A young summoner, Hibiki, wants to become the world’s most powerful summoner. In order to do so, she must travel to Earth and collect a set of powerful jewels. But along the way, she meets a strange young man, Sanjo, and discovers that she has a rival in her pursuit…

Review:

I was pleasantly surprised with this fantasy romp, featuring a very capable young Exorcist and the five elemental spirits she uses to battle dangerous spirits. Hibiki has been given a formidable task by her stern grandmother to collect the six Rikutou, powerful magical jewels that will determine the next leader of the Exorcist Underground. When gathered together, they will also cause a terrible calamity to occur if they are ever united. This doesn’t sound like a very good way to pick your next leader, but I guess they do things differently in the Exorcist Underground.

Hibiki is a cheerful young girl with immense supernatural powers. She journeys from chapter to chapter with her new friend Kenta, a boy with some magical abilities, and her elemental spirits. Everything is fairly episodic, and each chapter has a monster of the week feel to it. It’s the humor and diverse personalities that kept me turning the pages, because there really isn’t anything new presented in this series. It takes a tried and true formula, adds fun characters to it, and mixes in a few laughs. It’s a light, breezy read.

for distribution and new products. The deal saw Tpop packaging such bestsellers as The Warriors for HC., but not much seems to have been done of late between the two companies. After weathering the storms of the US manga industry, Tokyopop is still around and the Diamond deal marks another page in its resurgence.

The deal also marks a new interest in manga for Diamond — in a rather unusual development, Tokyopop’s President & COO John Parker is leaving the company to join Diamond as VP of Business Development where, based on the happy comments in the PR, he’ll help make sure Tokyopop products are treated right. PR below:

TOKYOPOP and Diamond announced today a new sales and distribution agreement between the companies, with a focus on consolidating efforts to build out the manga graphic novel segment across both comic book and bookselling retailers. The new endeavor will commence on July 1, 2011, as TOKYOPOP transitions over its current bookselling distribution from Harper Collins to Diamond Book Distributors.

The new arrangement will become Diamond Book Distributor’s most comprehensive effort to date within the manga space, as TOKYOPOP’s 150+ annual new releases and 2000+ backlist titles will become available through the comic book distribution giant. As part of that effort, TOKYOPOP’s President & COO John Parker will join Diamond in the newly-created role of Vice President of Business Development.

“I’m excited about the opportunities for both TOKYOPOP and Diamond in this new arrangement,” Parker said. “A combination of the strengths of both companies will lead to significant new opportunities in the manga business.”

TOKYOPOP Founder & CEO Stu Levy added, “John has been my right-hand partner at TOKYOPOP for nearly twelve years, and I am thrilled to have him be the one helming our critical new business partnership with Diamond Book Distributors.”

Both comic shop and book retailers will be able to purchase the entire range of TOKYOPOP products from one source, Diamond Comic Distributors, and partake in creative marketing efforts to increase their in-store sales of manga.

Diamond’s Vice President of Purchasing Bill Schanes said, “Diamond welcomes John Parker and the premiere innovators and leaders of the manga revolution, TOKYOPOP. We are excited about our future together.”

For book market retailers interested in more information about the upcoming product line, please contact Moria Trent at Diamond 410-560-7100 ext. 862.

2 Comments on Tokyopop goes to Diamond for distribution, last added: 1/15/2011

Good News: Diamond replaces Marvel with Tokyopop, and maintains the bottom line.

Bad News: My workload just increased…

Tommy Raiko said, on 1/15/2011 7:39:00 AM

So, HarperCollins does not continue their relationship with Tokyopop. Random House dramatically changes its presence in the manga category by axing DelRay Manga (but doing distribution for Kodansha Comics.)

It’s tempting to read these events as “real” publishers becoming un-enchanted with the manga category that a few years ago was the hot, sexy thing everyone wanted a piece of.

Of course, Simon & Schuster still distributes VIZ, and Hachette still has its own publishing program thru Yen Press, so I’m probably being prematurely pessimistic. Until another shoe drops, of course…

Tatsuya Tsugawa loses his wealthy parents in the middle of high school. Trying to fulfill his father’s dying wish of becoming an upstanding man, Tatsuya attempts to save a girl from obsessive bullies only to be consumed with intrigue and slight obsession himself. But what will Tatsuya do when his good will and earnest efforts lead him into a twisted fantasy world infested with mermaids and mind-controlling parasites?

Review:

I wasn’t wowed by this introductory volume of Yuna Kagesaki’s new series. It has a monster of the week feel, but the adversaries in the opening chapters weren’t very compelling. Protagonist Tatsuya is bland as well, and I found my attention wandering during the first half of the book.

Tatsuya Tsugawa is one of those mild-mannered, too good to be true characters who is an easy mark for school bullies. He doesn’t fight back when they rough him up for his lunch money, and it’s his friend Yoshiyuki who comes to his rescue. He’s a wimp. Tatsuya’s parents have both recently died in an unfortunate accident, and he is now a millionaire. On his deathbed, his father beseeches him to be a great man in everything he does. Taking his father’s last words to heart, Tatsuya tries to overcome his conflict avoidance tendencies by trying to help new girl Seine when she is bullied by a girl at school.

Tatsuya’s life takes an unexpected, and dangerous turn when he keeps trying to help Seine. She doesn’t need any help, he soon discovers, because she is immortal. She is locked in a war with mermaids and their mind-controlling parasites, and she scornfully rejects Tatsuya’s assistance, but the more she tries to brush him off, the more he wants to help and make his father proud.

I like the premise quite a bit, but found the execution dull. Tatsuya has the personality of a dishrag, but I am hoping that will change as he gets more involved in Seine’s war with the parasites. I also want to know more about Seine and the mermaids. I loved Chibi-Vampire, so I have high hopes for AiON. Hopefully all of the promising elements will come together for me in the next volume.

Word is going around that LA manga publisherToykopop has laid off several more people — including editors Lillian Diaz-Przybyl and Troy Lewter. The staff is now reduced to a mere handful of people — including owner Stu Levy and publisher Mike Kiley.

Although a giant and founder of the American manga boom with their authentic right-to-left manga, Tokyopop has been downsizing significantly over the last few years. The moves come just as the company had launched its “America’s Greatest Otaku” tv show on Hullu, and it had recently announced several new manga licenses, as well.

Diaz-Przybyl is particular had been a standout at the company over the years, helping introduce many creators in the amazing wave of talent in the “Original English Language” or OEL manga line. Just a few days ago she blogged about how manga titles get canceled before they are finished.

We contacted Tokyopop for comment, but email for the last PR person we talked to there bounced back.

If only Stu and Kiley would have left long ago the company would be a great success.

Stu’s ego destroyed TP and Kiley was clue-less.

Andre said, on 3/1/2011 10:39:00 AM

Wow, I’m kind of shocked. Lillian was one of the nicest folks I’ve corresponded with, and had been with Tokyopop for years. She took a lot of flack recently for that article, which was done with the best of intentions. I hope publishers and editors reading this take note and keep her in mind, she’d definitely be an asset to any team.

Brent P. Newhall said, on 3/1/2011 10:49:00 AM

Wow, that is a shame. I hope it’s a cost-cutting move to stabilize themselves, rather than a portent of things to come. Manga’s a tough market.

Jeff Albertson said, on 3/1/2011 11:00:00 AM

Sad to see yet more layoffs in the comics biz. Here’s hoping everyone finds new positions soon.

I’m gladder than ever that I never pursued my idle dreams of working in comics . . . .

Humberto Saabedra said, on 3/1/2011 11:00:00 AM

Maybe if Stu focused on manga instead of turning Tokyopop into a 10th rate multimedia empire, the company might actually be relevant again. As it stands, it chooses to focus on a TV show instead of marketing its product. That’s bad.

monopole said, on 3/1/2011 11:07:00 AM

Depressing, and annoying. Particularly with regard to the post on cancelling series before they finish and series going out of print. I always start at Volume 1 and work my way sequentially through a manga. Boookstores which don’t stock volume one lose the sale for the rest of the series.
Also, while I’ll be happy to give a new series a shot at $10 a pop I need a taste or some buzz before I by volume 1. Back when multiple anime magazines were out I’d have an idea what to anticipate and what I’d want to buy. Now it’s very hit or miss.

The out of print issue is understandable in the dead-tree world due to the Thor Decision making it infeasible to keep a backlog. But in the e-book world out of print is irrelevant as is consignment. Couple this with the ease of reading manga on ebooks (the nook color shines in this regard). If they were smart, a publisher like tokyopop would set up a subscription model with comixcology or another reader app. I’d be overjoyed to pay to get the latest “Negima” or “Bleach” chapter automatically sent to my tablet promptly after publication, particularly since this would support the mangaka. In the same fashion free samples are easy to implement as well.

The final leg of a successful publishing strategy would be to integrate direct links in Baka-Manga, ANN or similar sites with an associate program. This would make just as easy to buy (or better yet subscribe) than download from scanlation sites.

lys said, on 3/1/2011 11:17:00 AM

Oh man, this makes me really sad!! I’ve enjoyed and appreciated Lillian’s input and interaction with readers on behalf of Tokyopop over the last several months. Ugh. I’m so, so sorry to hear this; I wish and hope for the best to all affected by these layoffs!

Ali T. Kokmen said, on 3/1/2011 11:20:00 AM

Sad news indeed. My sympathies to all those laid off. I used to run into Lillian now and then on the circuit; she is indeed a great person and I wish her–and everyone else–nothing but good luck in getting to the next step in their post-Tokyopop career.

Nicole said, on 3/1/2011 11:54:00 AM

Really Rob? I always thought you were such an upstanding and kind guy. I’m surprised that you would publicly say such mean things, especially when you only know a small portion of the big picture. I know that Kiley and I never had a bad word to say about you. Totally sad and disappointed.

The Beat said, on 3/1/2011 12:17:00 PM

I would like to back-up the idea that some company should snap up Lillian right away. She’s one of the most groundbreaking editors of the past decade. And one of the nicest to boot.

Josh Elder said, on 3/1/2011 12:28:00 PM

I’ve worked with both Lilian and Troy and found them to be great people and great talents.

And TPOP alumni have never had any trouble landing on their feet, so I have no concerns for these two either.

Good luck and godspeed, guys!

Steve Horton said, on 3/1/2011 1:32:00 PM

Troy has been a friend for years (though we haven’t spoken in awhile) and I didn’t know he managed to hold on to his job at TokyoPop for this long — six years after I almost did an OEL there. (Remember those?)

Really hope he lands on his feet. He’s a great guy.

AACRO said, on 3/1/2011 5:44:00 PM

Stu Levy is a bull with a dozen swords in his back and neck staggering towards the matador as if he can still win this, but has no idea he’s already dead.

With the talent they just threw away I hope those editors start their own publishing company and fully realize the “OEL” model all the way.

Ed said, on 3/2/2011 5:34:00 AM

I also believe that if your company’s main direction – publishing – is suffering, then maybe you should take care of that business and let the fluffy stuff – Internet reality shows – go. They are risking the fate of a great company, and it looks, at least from the outside, that there is no leaders or direction anymore.

I’d also like to comment that the article itself could use a little more editing ;)

Tomo is a high school girl who lives in a town by a beach. One day she gets harassed on a bus, but is rescued by one of her classmates. Afterwards, he drops his keys, and the key ring has the same stone as one given to Tomo by a boy during her childhood. Is he the same person? Tomo believes the sea can bestow treasures on people, and she may about to be proven right in ways she couldn’t imagine.

Review:

Skyblue Shore is a slice of life series, and as events slowly unfold, more of protagonist Tomo’s personality is revealed. Tomo’s parents are divorced, and she lives with her mother. Tomo is the more reliable member of her little family, and she is the one who takes care of her mom. Her mother’s parents are wealthy, and while her mom is more than happy to sponge off of them, Tomo has a bit more pride and wants to be self-reliant. She is good natured, dependable, and hard-working and everybody loves her because she is so nice. Though I often find too good to be true characters boring, I liked Tomo and her sunny personality.

When she was a young child, she met a boy on the beach. They both spent the day beachcombing together, and he gave Tomo an agate, which she has kept and treasured since. The boy mysteriously disappears, and Tomo is left wondering what happened to him. When Riku saves her from a groper on the bus, he drops a key chain with the same stone. Could he be the boy from her past? She’s determined to find him, return his key to him, and find out if he’s the same person.

The tone of this story is soft and gentle, like the steady ebb of waves. It builds on little events that interconnect Tomo’s life with Riku’s, as well as his younger brother, Tento. While Riku is confident and outgoing, Tento is withdrawn and walls himself off from most of his classmates. He is helplessly drawn to Tomo, and soon there is an interesting triangle in the works. Tomo is attracted to Riku, while Tento likes Tomo. I am so curious to see how their relationships play out! While I like Riku, too, I think that Tento and Tomo make a great couple. They like the same things, and where he hesitates and is content to observe, Tomo is quick to jump into the middle of everything. Her brashness and his caution compliment each other very well.

I thought the art style worked well with the laid-back tone of the story. There’s a lot of focus on facial expressions and posture to communicate the characters’ feelings to the reader. You’re never left wondering what Tomo is thinking or feeling. I liked the use of white space, too. There are many scenes where background details aren’t important, and Nanpei Yamada puts all of her efforts into keeping the center of attention firmly placed on her characters.

I enjoyed the leisurely pacing of this first installment of Skyblue Shore, and am eager to see what happens next!